Grammar Analysis and Description

I have mentioned that EDI grammar is the most complicated grammar we'll deal with in this book because we must be concerned with both the overall file structure and the grammar of an individual record (or EDI segment). In this section I will finally prove it to you.

It takes some fairly complicated processing to handle EDI grammar. I prefer to tackle this task only once by developing a generalized approach that can be used for most classes of EDI grammars. For that reason we'll consider grammar features that aren't necessarily part of version 004010 of X12 but may be features of later versions or other syntaxes such as UN/EDIFACT's ISO 9735 syntax. We're not going to concern ourselves with interchange and group ...

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