A user-extensible and adaptable parser architecture

Some parsers need to be very precise and strict when parsing, yet must allow users to easily adapt or extend the parser to parse new inputs, without requiring that the user have an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the parser’s internal workings. This paper presents a novel parsing architecture, designed for parsing Postfix log files, that aims to make the process of parsing new inputs as simple as possible, enabling users to trivially add new rules (to parse variants of existing inputs) and relatively easily add new actions (to process a previously unknown category of input). The architecture scales linearly or better as the number of rules and size of input increases, making it suitable for parsing large corpora or months of accumulated data.