/ 
HOP-Lexer-0.032
River stage one • 2 direct dependents • 2 total dependents
/ HOP::Lexer

NAME

HOP::Lexer - "Higher Order Perl" Lexer

VERSION

Version 0.032

SYNOPSIS

use HOP::Lexer 'string_lexer';
 
my @input_tokens = (
    [ 'VAR',   qr/[[:alpha:]]+/    ],
    [ 'NUM',   qr/\d+/             ],
    [ 'OP',    qr/[+=]/            ],
    [ 'SPACE', qr/\s*/, sub { () } ],
);
 
my $text  = 'x = 3 + 4';
my $lexer = string_lexer( $text, @input_tokens );
 
my @tokens;
while ( my $token = $lexer->() ) {
    push @tokens, $token;
}

EXPORT

Two functions may be exported, make_lexer and string_lexer.

FUNCTIONS

make_lexer

my $lexer = make_lexer( $input_iterator, @tokens );

The make_lexer function expects an input data iterator as the first argument and a series of tokens as subsequent arguments. It returns a stream of lexed tokens. The output tokens are two element arrays:

[ $label, $matched_text ]

The iterator should be a subroutine reference that returns the next value merely by calling the subroutine with no arguments. If you have a single block of text in a scalar that you want lexed, see the string_lexer function.

The input @tokens array passed into make_lexer is expected to be a list of array references with two mandatory items and one optional one:

[ $label, qr/$match/, &transform ]

  • $label

    The $label is the name used for the first item in an output token.

  • $match

    The $match is either an exact string or regular expression which matches the text the label is to identify.

  • &transform

    The &transform subroutine reference is optional. If supplied, this will take the matched text and should return a token matching an output token or an empty list if the token is to be discarded. For example, to discard whitespace (the label is actually irrelevant, but it helps to document the code):

    [ 'WHITESPACE', /\s+/, sub {()} ]

    The two arguments supplied to the transformation subroutine are the label and value. Thus, if we wish to force all non-negative integers to have a unary plus, we might do something like this:

    [ 
  'REVERSED INT',  # the label
  /[+-]?\d+/,      # integers with an optional unary plus or minus
  sub { 
    my ($label, $value) = @_;
    $value = "+$value" unless $value =~ /^[-+]/;
    [ $label, $value ]
  } 
]

For example, let's say we want to convert the string "x = 3 + 4" to the following tokens:

[ 'VAR', 'x' ]
[ 'OP',  '=' ]
[ 'NUM', 3   ]
[ 'OP',  '+' ]
[ 'NUM', 4   ]

One way to do this would be with the following code:

my $text = 'x = 3 + 4';
my @text = ($text);
my $iter = sub { shift @text };

my @input_tokens = (
    [ 'VAR',   qr/[[:alpha:]]+/    ],
    [ 'NUM',   qr/\d+/             ],
    [ 'OP',    qr/[+=]/            ],
    [ 'SPACE', qr/\s*/, sub { () } ],
);

my $lexer = make_lexer( $iter, @input_tokens );

my @tokens;
while ( my $token = $lexer->() ) {
    push @tokens, $token;
}

@tokens would contain the desired tokens.

Note that the order in which the input tokens are passed in might cause input to be lexed in different ways, thus the order is significant (/\w+/ might slurp up numbers before /\b\d+\b/ can read them).

string_lexer

my $lexer = string_lexer( $string, @tokens );

This function is identical to make_lexer, but takes a string as the first argument. This is merely syntactic sugar for the common case where we have our data in a string but don't want to create an iterator. The following are equivalent.

my $lexer = string_lexer( $text, @input_tokens );

Versus:

my @text  = ($text);
my $iter  = sub { shift @text };
my $lexer = make_lexer( $iter, @input_tokens );

DEBUGGING

The following caveats (or pitfalls, if you prefer), should be kept in mind while lexing data.

  • Unlexed data

    The tokens returned by the lexer are array references. If any data cannot be lexed, it will be returned as a string, unchanged.

  • Capturing parens

    Internally, Hop::Lexer uses capturing parentheses to extract the data from the provided regular expressions. If you need to group data in regular expressions, use the non-capturing parentheses (?:...). Otherwise, your code will break.

  • Precedence

    It's important to note that the order of the described tokens is important. If you have keywords such as "while", "if", "unless", and so on, and any text which matches qr/[[:word:]]+/ is considered a variable, the following fails:

    my @input_tokens = (
    [ 'VAR',     qr/[[:word:]]+/         ],
    [ 'KEYWORD', qr/(?:while|if|unless)/ ],
);

    This is because the potential keywords will be matched as VAR. To deal with this, place the higher precedence tokens first:

    my @input_tokens = (
    [ 'KEYWORD', qr/(?:while|if|unless)/ ],
    [ 'VAR',     qr/[[:word:]]+/         ],
);

AUTHOR

Mark Jason Dominus. Maintained by Curtis "Ovid" Poe, <ovid@cpan.org>

BUGS

Please report any bugs or feature requests to bug-hop-lexer@rt.cpan.org, or through the web interface at http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=HOP-Lexer. I will be notified, and then you'll automatically be notified of progress on your bug as I make changes.

FURTHER READING

See http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2006/01/05/parsing.html for a detailed article about using this module, along with a comprehensive example.

This has now been included in the distribution as HOP::Lexer::Article.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to Mark Dominus and Elsevier, Inc. for allowing this work to be republished.

COPYRIGHT & LICENSE

Code derived from the book "Higher-Order Perl" by Mark Dominus, published by Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Copyright 2005 by Elsevier Inc.

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