Welcome to Spirit
Spirit is a set of C++ libraries for parsing and output generation
implemented as Domain Specific Embedded Languages (DSEL) using Expression templates and Template Meta-Programming. The Spirit libraries enable a
target grammar to be written exclusively in C++. Inline grammar
specifications can mix freely with other C++ code and, thanks to the
generative power of C++ templates, are immediately executable.
Spirit is part of Boost Libraries, a
peer-reviewed, open collaborative development effort.
Mar 09
Tino Didriksin published yet another speed comparison of different ways to convert an integer into a string (see his blog A howl on the Wind…). And again, Karma turns out to be the leader of the pack by being upto 10 times faster than the other tested methods. This nicely supports our own measurements (see here). Thanks Tino!
Tagged with: Karma
Mar 05
The following article is about tracking the parsing position with Spirit V2. This is useful for generating error messages which tell the user exactly where an error has occurred. We also show how to use Spirit V2 to parse from an input stream without first reading the whole stream into a std::string.
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Tagged with: MultiPass • Qi
Mar 03
The concept of Spirit’s semantic actions seems to be easy enough to understand as most people new to the library prefer their usage over applying the built-in attribute propagation rules. That is not surprising. The idea of attaching a function to any point of a grammar which is called whenever the corresponding parser matched is straighforward to grasp. Earlier versions of Spirit required a semantic action to conform to a very specific interface. Today’s semantic actions are more flexible and more powerful. Recently, a couple of people asked questions about them. So I decided dedicating this Tip of the Day to the specifics and the usage model of semantic actions in Spirit Qi.
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Tagged with: Karma • Qi
Feb 24
Spirit supports skipper based parsing since its very invention. So this is definitely not something new to Spirit V2. Nevertheless, the recent discussion on the Spirit mailing list around the semantics of Qi’s lexeme[] directive shows the need for some clarification. Today I try to answer questions like: “What does it mean to use a skipper while parsing?”, or “When do I want to use a skipper and when not?”.
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Tagged with: Qi
Feb 17
Recently, there have been a couple of questions on the Spirit mailing list asking how to parse as set of things known in advance in any sequence and any combination. A simple example would be a list of key/value pairs with known keys but the keys may be ordered in any sequence. This use case seems to be quite common. Fortunately Spirit provides you with a predefined parser component designed for exactly that purpose: the permutation parser.
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Tagged with: Qi
Feb 08
Here is another question raised from time to time: “I know how to use a plain struct as an attribute for a sequence parser in Qi by adapting it with BOOST_FUSION_ADAPT_STRUCT. Unfortunately this does not work if the struct is a template. What can I do in this case?”.
There have been plans for a while to create a separate Fusion facility BOOST_FUSION_ADAPT_TPL_STRUCT allowing to adapt templated data types, but this is not in place yet. Today I will describe a trick you can apply to adapt your templates into ‘proper’ Fusion sequences anyway.
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Tagged with: Qi
Feb 05
Promising to be the main face-to-face event for all things Boost, BoostCon 2010 opens the door to your C++ future. From using the Boost libraries to writing and maintaining them, from evangelizing to deploying Boost within your organization, from infrastructure and process to vision and mission, and from TR1 to TR2, BoostCon brings together the sessions, the colleagues, and the inspiration to support your work with Boost for the next year.
To reflect the breadth of the Boost community, the conference includes sessions aimed at two constituencies: Boost end-users and hard-core Boost library and tool developers. The program fosters interaction and engagement within and across those two groups, with an emphasis on hands-on, participatory sessions.
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Jan 31
Most questions on the main Spirit mailing list are centered around attributes and how to correctly utilize Spirit’s attribute propagation rules. We discussed the related basics in several posts already, but many people still have problems to understand the rules. Somebody recently asked on the mailing list whether it would be possible to print the attribute type exposed by an arbitrary parser expression. I answered by posting a sketchy code snippet (see here), but afterwards I realized it might be a good topic for yet another ‘Tip of the Day’.
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Tagged with: Qi
Jan 28
After writing about local variables for rules here I would like to get back to some information I have had lying around for some time already. Today’s topic seems to be a nice fit as porting the dynamic parsers from Spirit.Classic requires to utilize local variables. This allows me to give you some more examples for this facility.
Previous versions of Spirit, which are the versions we refer to as Spirit.Classic today, implemented special dynamic parsers allowing to insert control statements into the parsing process (such as if_p, while_p, and for_p). These dynamic parsers are not available anymore in Qi. But it is easy enough to achieve the same behavior using existing Qi components. This ‘Tip of the Day’ describes those techniques, which have been developed and contributed by Carl Barron. Thanks Carl!
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Tagged with: Qi
Jan 26
A couple of days ago I promised to get back to this topic (if you want to refresh your memory, here is the discussion of those operators in Qi). Today we will discuss Karma’s unary operators ‘!’ and ‘~’. These have very similar semantics as their counterparts in Qi, but as usual, we have to turn things inside out in order to make them fit to output generation.
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Tagged with: Karma
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