/tags/theoretical/ Recent content in Theoretical on Amit Agarwal Linux Blog Hugo -- gohugo.io en Wed, 15 Dec 2010 14:37:44 +0000 /2010/12/15/building-a-finite-state-machine-using-dfasimple/ Wed, 15 Dec 2010 14:37:44 +0000 /2010/12/15/building-a-finite-state-machine-using-dfasimple/ <!--[ad#ad-2]--> <p><a href="http://www.perl.com/pub/2004/09/23/fsms.html">http://www.perl.com/pub/2004/09/23/fsms.html</a></p> <p>Building a <a class="zem_slink" title="Finite-state machine" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine">Finite State Machine</a> Using DFA::Simple By Bill Ruppert on September 23, 2004 12:00 AM I am converting some articles from <a class="zem_slink" title="Microsoft Word" rel="homepage" href="http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/">MS Word</a> to <a class="zem_slink" title="HTML" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML">HTML</a> by hand. I often use bulleted outlines so I face a lot of work creating lists with nested sub-lists. It didn’t take opening and closing many</p> <p>and</p></p> <ul> <li> <p>tags to realize I wanted to automate the task. It’s very easy to use filters with my text editor and I’ve written several in <a class="zem_slink" title="Perl" rel="homepage" href="http://www.perl.org/">Perl</a> to speed up my HTML formatting. I decided to create a filter to handle this annoying chore. After a little thought I decided the logic involved was just tricky enough to use a finite state machine (FSM) to keep things straight.</p>