Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
Every so often, every developer finds themselves having to parse data out of text. There are loads of ways of approaching this task, but a lot of pretty unsatisfactory solutions start from "I'll just split up the text by whitespace" or "Hey, let's use regular expressions!". You all remember what regular expressions lead to, right?
As someone who's always on the lookout for something interesting and new to experiment with, I came across an alternative approach to parsing text recently. A blog post I read (I forget what it was, or I'd give credit) linked to the Sprache project on GitHub. This is a text parsing library which lets you construct the descriptions of the text to parse using Linq-style expressions.
So I thought I'd invent an idea for an experimental project to test this out...
Recently I was looking into how custom caching might improve the performance of Layouts in Sitecore. But one important aspect of the concept of improving performance with tricks like that which I didn't discuss was how you can work out places where caching will give you benefits...
