Is using a FSM a good design for general text parsing?

Posted by eSKay on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by eSKay
Published on 2010-05-05T20:10:35Z Indexed on 2010/05/05 20:18 UTC
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fsm

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language-agnostic

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algorithm

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algorithm-design

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Implementation

I am reading a file that is filled with hex numbers. I have to identify a particular pattern, say "aaad" (without quotes) from it. Every time I see the pattern, I generate some data to some other file.

This would be a very common case in designing programs - parsing and looking for a particular pattern.

I have designed it as a Finite State Machine and structured structured it in C using switch-case to change states. This was the first implementation that occured to me.

DESIGN: Are there some better designs possible?
IMPLEMENTATION: Do you see some problems with using a switch case as I mentioned?

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