Wanted: C to PB Header file translator

[Scott Turchin]

Anyone know of such ac ritter?

I have one that is 14,459 lines long...

[Daniel Corbier]

Dacorbi Pattern Search

Take a look at Dacorbi Pattern Search (at www.dacorbi.com ). It should be an ideal tool for such a task. It comes with a starter Delphi to BASIC converter module. If you examine the patterns for that one, you should be able to do something like it for translating a C header to PB. If I could see a sample of your original C header code, I might be able to get you started.

[jcfuller]

I believe that would be José Roca

James

[Michael Mattias]

It's old but it's a start...
Win 32: Use REGEXPR to convert ".h" and .".rc" files into PB ".bi" files with equates March 05, 2000

(Ok, so that's the easy stuff. What did you expect of me then? I was new!)

[Daniel Corbier]

Here's a Dacorbi Pattern solution

This should be very easy to do with Dacorbi Pattern Search. Let me show you how. Let me start with a before/after shot of a sample header, which you'll see to the right (the after shot is obtained by pressing Replace All):

Before


After


There is no need to write complicated parsing code. Dacorbi Pattern Search handles that part for you. All you have to do is create a series of Search / Replace rules using Dacorbi Patterns (you can then save it for further use). Basically, you tell it:

• When you find something like 0xFFFF change it to &HFFFF
• When you find something like #define Add(a, b) a+b, change it to Macro Add(a, b) = a + b
• etc.

The rules all works concurrently. Here, I have just 8 rules, and you can see just one of them in the screenshot. You will want to gradually add to it (community project anyone?). Here is the list of all 8 rules in this example: (they all have the "Pass Once" box checkmarked; also some lines have a carriage return in the Replace box, but you can't see it in the representation below):

---------------- Pattern 1 of 8 ----------------

Find
const {ConstantName} = {Value};

Replace With
%{ConstantName} = {Value}

---------------- Pattern 2 of 8 ----------------

Find
const {DataType} {ConstantName} = {Value};

Replace With
macro {ConstantName} = {Value}

---------------- Pattern 3 of 8 ----------------

Find
//

Replace With
'

---------------- Pattern 4 of 8 ----------------

Find
/* {Comment} */

Replace With

---------------- Pattern 5 of 8 ----------------

Find
#define {Constant} {"\r\n"}

Replace With
%{Constant} = 1

---------------- Pattern 6 of 8 ----------------

Find
#define {MacroName} {Value} {"\r\n"}

Replace With
Macro {MacroName} = {Value}

---------------- Pattern 7 of 8 ----------------

Find
#define {MacroName}({Params}) {Value} {"\r\n"}

Replace With
Macro {MacroName}({Params}) = {Value}

---------------- Pattern 8 of 8 ----------------

Find
{HexPrefix:"0x"}{HexNumber:"[0-9A-F]+"}

Replace With
&H{HexNumber}