A Working Mathematician’s Guide to Parsing

> Our hero, a mathematician, is writing notes in LaTeX and needs to convert it to a format that her blog platform accepts. She’s used to using dollar sign delimiters for math mode, but her blog requires \( \) and \[ \].

Unless our hero mathematician is writing, like, several blog posts a day, using tools like parser generators and writing your grammar in BNF and the like is WAY overkill. Just use search/replace and manually fix it up. Or, like, maybe some kind of editor macro/multiple cursor nonsense in your fully-featured text editor. If she really wants to go nuts, she should write a four-line python script to do the search/replace a tiny bit smarter. Fixing it up with some manual oversight takes like three minutes per blog post at most, it's not worth trying to automate fully.

This is one of them "killing an ant with a nuclear bomb" situations.

My go-to library for parsing in Python is https://github.com/pyparsing/pyparsing, a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing_expression_grammar -based https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parser_combinator library. I generally find it much easier to get my head around parser combinators than parser generators.

Just use pandoc[1] — assuming the blog platform accepts a well known markup language.

[1] https://pandoc.org

For converting LaTex to WordPress, I'm a fan of https://lucatrevisan.wordpress.com/latex-to-wordpress/

Sadly, he don't understand what LaTeX is and what TeX is. And $$ is a TeX macro, should not be used in LaTeX, the are much better math display environments.