Cards Text Grammar

[silly freak]

This is a list of the possibilities of the "text" line in card files:

General Grammar

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Text:
  Effects
  ActivatedAbility
  TriggeredAbility

ActivatedAbility:
  Costs ":" Effects

TriggeredAbility:
  Trigger "," Effects

Costs:
  Cost
  Cost "," Costs

Effects:
  Effect "."
  Effect Effects


"Features"

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Cost:
  ManaSequence
  "{T}"
  "{Q}"
  "Sacrifice ~"

Effect:
  "Add" ManaSequence "to your mana pool"
  "Draw a card" | "Draw" Number "cards"
  "~ deals" Number "damage to all creatures"
  "Destroy all creatures" ". They can't be regenerated"?

Trigger:
  "When ~ enters the battlefield"


In Progress:

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Effect:
  "You gain" Number "life"


Generally, parsing uses regular expressions, so it is case-sensitive. However, the literals support lowercase in addition to the case in the examples; e.g.

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Example  Regex actually used
"You"    "[Yy]ou"
"you"    "you"


When different literals are combined, e.g.

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Trigger "," Effects


additional whitespace is allowed ("\s*")

[nantuko84]

Have you tried ANTLR?
It generates lexer and parser with built-in constructions bases on grammar written in format very similar to BNF (Backus Normal Form).

[silly freak]

I have heard (and read in your blog) of it, but not yet tried it. I played with DSLs in Scala, and will probably use ANTLR at some point.