Phew, ok. We didn’t plan on having to do this additional episode after the last one, but it just goes to show how truly bizarre parser-printers can be. We didn’t think it would take us 6 episodes to cover the foundations of parser-printers, yet here we are.

But, we don’t think it’s appropriate to end the series just yet. So far we’ve only built a single parser-printer, which is essentially just a CSV parser that transforms the data into an array of User structs. While we did encounter some mind trippy stuff along the way, real world parser-printers can have even more bizarre situations that need careful thinking. So, we want to end this series by building one more parser-printer that is a lot more complex.

Recall that the parser we used as an example when building up the parser library from scratch in past episodes was a “marathon race” parser. It worked on a textual format that described a collection of races, each race of which had a city name, an entry fee with different currencies, and a list of geographic coordinates that described the race route.