Voracious Separators¶

String-type separators operate by attempting to match the first occurrence of the separator in the corresponding TEXT-type token.

However, it is sometimes useful for the separators to try to match the last occurrence of the separator within the token sequence. For this, the separator is simply prefixed with the character ‘:’. This type of separator is called “voracious”.

Example: Imagine that an electronic bookshop that lists the different authors of a book separated by commas and that uses this same separator to separate the list of authors from the price of the book:

Ron Rivest, Rick Adleman, 12 euros; ...

If we were to write:

... :AUTHORS "," :PRICE ";" ...

Then the attribute AUTHORS is assigned the value ‘Ron Rivest’ and PRICE the value ‘Rick Adleman, 12 euros’, which is probably not the required result.

However, we can indicate to the system that it should match the attribute AUTHORS with the TEXT found until the final “,” which precedes the pattern :PRICE “;”, writing the character “:” before “,”:

... :AUTHORS :"," :PRICE ";" ...

AUTHORS is assigned the value ‘Ron Rivest, Rick Adleman’ and PRICE the value ‘12 euros’.