Hello. I have always found string handling quite difficult in C. It also looks like sed, awk, perl etc. cannot handle all of my simple needs. Glib could be improved. I need often an extractor which finds something from an arbitrary data. I have routines file2buffer(), which loads a file to buffer, and bufferfind(), which searches for a string in the buffer. The file could be a html page downloaded with wget or a mixed binary and ascii file. Now more difficult example. I need to parse "12 pages" in a middle of a html page. For example, sscanf("%i pages",) yields nothing even there is only one "<number> pages" in the file. Now I first find the "pages" and move back over the "12" but this is not simple. The lexicar scanner in glib is nice, but a similar parser would be needed as well. A parser to which the rules are feeded at runtime -- not compiled as with flex/bison. p = parser_new(); parser_add_rule(p,"rule : token otherrule", callback); parser_add_rule(p,"rule : alttoken anotherrule", altcallback); <etc.> parser_prepare(p); // converts rules to efficient execution data structure parser_input(p,text); Then in my application, I could mix the bufferfind() with several miniparsers. And I could define miniparsers as needed in app's dialog without compiling anything. Juhana -- http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-graphics-dev for developers of open source graphics software _______________________________________________ gtk-list@xxxxxxxxx http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-list