Twenty years after the release of GEDCOM 5.5.1, version 5.5.5 was released. It’s just a relative small revision, but still, some progress as last.
Adoption of GEDCOM 5.5.5 – which is now the current version – is not promoted by the way the specification is distributed: in a ZIP-ed PDF document on the newly revived www.gedcom.org. This makes the specification not really easily accesible (and linkable). Further more, it’s hard to copy/paste from this PDF document (a lot of structure is lost). I hope, that a version in Markdown, or at least, HTML will be published soon.
The core of the GEDCOM specification is the grammar of GEDCOM. The purists will be disappointed. Like it’s predecessors, the grammar is not written in a formal notation. I hope in future versions the grammar will be described in a formal notation like Extended Backus–Naur Form (EBNF).
As the grammar of GEDCOM 5.5.5 is important for developers, I extracted the grammar from the GEDCOM 5.5.5 Specification PDF (version 2019-10-05) and posted the grammar on Github. So enjoy gedcom-5.5.5.grammar (embedded below), just as we did with gedcom-5.5.1.grammar and gedcom-5.5.grammar (in Paul Johnsons GEDCOM.pm github).
