Hacker News Reader

Comment by nurettin | Hacker News Reader

Once you know the tree, edi is trivial to parse. You can even do it with a loop and a state to store which level has which tag and what the current count is.

The real challenge was to discover what the tree was. Like wayfair order listings, cargo delivery messages, which are also similar to how Rhenus does them. Every vendor has their own format and standards.

View on HN

Even with the "tree", it is not that trivial, as a single segment tag may be repeated in the "tree", so you cannot just jump to that segment and execute a callback. You need to be aware of the possible transitions from any given "node" in the tree. Edison solves this by computing a state machine graph whose nodes are all segments, and edges are all transitions, so parsing is just a walk in the graph.

For anyone who's encountered this, you likely have access to these but either they are being sent to random email alias at your company or you need to request these (clearinghouses typically have this, but you can also request from the vendor/partner). I'll never forget how _angry_ I was to find out after finishing a project that there was a spec with everything I needed and nobody had bothered to send it to me while I was implementing the project.

Once I started parsing example messages with the above method, the format became apparent. I even made a viewer for it which was useful because people we were integrating with were also making mistakes and I was the one correcting them thanks to the viewer.

The hardest part was europeans taking 15 day holidays every couple of months leaving work to someone else who had to start over.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com