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Marpa-R2-2.067_001
River stage two • 39 direct dependents • 56 total dependents
/ Marpa::R2::Tracing

NAME

Marpa::R2::Tracing - Tracing your grammar

Description

This document is an overview of the techniques for tracing and debugging parses and grammars using Marpa's SLIF interface.

Basic techniques

Check the input location where parsing failed

If parsing failed in the recognizer, look at the input location where it happened. Compare the input against the grammar. This step is fairly obvious, but I include it because even experts (actually, especially experts) will sometimes overlook the obvious in a rush to use more advanced techniques.

Trace terminals

Set the trace_terminals recognizer named argument to 1. This tells you which tokens the recognizer is looking for and which ones it thinks it found. If the problem is in lexing, trace_terminals tells you the whole story. Even if the problem is not in the lexing, tracing terminals can tell you a lot.

Trace progress

Tracing the recognizer's progress with show_progress is most powerful tool available in the basic toolkit. show_progress should provide all the information necessary to debug an application's grammar. A separate document explains how to interpret the progress reports. That document includes an example of the use of show_progress to debug an error in a grammar.

Double check rules and symbols

It sometimes helps to look carefully at the output of show_rules. Check if anything there is not what you expected.

Other traces

Setting the SLIF recognizer's trace_values named argument to a trace level of 1 traces the values of the parse tree nodes as they are pushed on, and popped off, the evaluation stack.

Basic checklist

A full investigation of a parse includes the following:

  • Turn on the trace_terminals recognizer named argument.

  • Run show_rules on the precomputed grammar.

  • Run show_progress on the recognizer.

  • Set the trace_values evaluator named argument to level 1.

When considering how much tracing to turn on, remember that if the input text to the grammar is large, the outputs from trace_terminals, show_progress, and trace_values will be very lengthy. You want to work with short inputs when possible.

Copyright and License

Copyright 2013 Jeffrey Kegler
This file is part of Marpa::R2.  Marpa::R2 is free software: you can
redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser
General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation,
either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Marpa::R2 is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser
General Public License along with Marpa::R2.  If not, see
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.