Abstract
The syntax and semantics of internet standards are most often specified in
an Internet Request for Comments (RFC). The specification for the Hyper-
text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) (RFC 2616) presents the grammar for its
messages in a form known as Backus-Naur form (BNF). The application
reads these statements to generate a parser that reads http messages. To
demonstrate this technique, we use the parser as a building block in a web
server.