LPEG primer

[Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@...>]

Hi list!

I'm planning in the near future to start learning to use LPEG as a more 
powerful alternative to regexes and Lua patterns (with added readability 
and maintenance ease). Is there a good freely-available in-depth 
primer/tutorial for that?

I've searched the internet for PEG and LPEG, but everything I found was 
rather heavy on the Computer Science side. Although my CS skills are not 
zero, they are still basic on the theoretical side. I know how to read 
EBNF-like specs and know what a parser or lexer are and their general 
working principles, but definitely I am not able to design a grammar 
taking into account operator precedence, ambiguity, left-recursion and 
the like (not that I need that so much, but only to give a hint to my 
skill level).

Therefore I'd need something practical, more focused on pattern matching 
than on parsing languages. I need LPEG essentially for text searches and 
simple string parsing for DSLs (very simple, math-like expressions 
especially) - I cannot give more information on the specific needs 
because for now I'd only like to learn LPEG in the hope it will help me 
in the tasks for which I usually employ (sometimes fairly complex and 
ugly) regexes.

I only found an article by Gavin Wraith, but it is from 1997 and I don't 
know if it is still current now that LPEG 0.10 has come out.
Moreover it is still a bit concise, albeit fairly clear. I also skimmed 
through a scientific paper by Roberto, but although it gave me some more 
hints, it was rather focused on the implementation of LPEG and less on 
its practical use (of course I understand it was not meant as a tutorial 
for non computer scientists). I also gave a look to LPEG recipes in the 
Wiki, but I found them rather obscure (I realized I miss enough LPEG 
background for those).


Any pointer is appreciated.
Thanks!

-- Lorenzo