Jul 23

Mike Lewis posted a marvelous experience report dubbed ‘Optimizing Boost Spirit – Blazing fast AST generation using boost::spirit’. He describes how he took an old compiler for the Epoch programming language (which was based on Spirit.Classic) and tuned it for performance using Spirit.Qi and Spirit.Lex. His results are exceptional, he got roughly a thousand fold speedup compared to the old version. The complete code for his compiler can be downloaded from here.

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Jun 08

This is the first time I missed attending BoostCon (May 15-20, 2011 – Aspen, Colorado). Fortunately, for us who were not able to attend, Marshall Clow uploaded some videos. Here’s one one that’s relevant to Spirit: “Spirit.Qi in the Real World”, by Robert Stewart. Watch the presentation here:

http://blip.tv/boostcon/spirit-qi-in-the-real-world-5254335

You can find the slides here: https://github.com/boostcon/2011_presentations/raw/master/tue/spirit_qi_in_the_real_world.pdf

Past sessions on Spirit have focused on introducing Spirit or showing extracts of real use, intermingled with tutorial highlights. Upon writing real Spirit.Qi parsers, however, one quickly discovers that “the devil is in the details.” There are special cases, tricks, and idioms that one must discover by trial and error or, perhaps, by following the Spirit mailing list, all of which take time and may not be convenient. In this session, we’ll walk through the development of a Spirit.Qi parser for printf()-style format strings. The result will be a replacement for printf() that is typesafe and efficient.

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Apr 16

The keyword parser construct has recently been added to spirit’s repository (available in 1.47 or from svn) . Here’s a small introduction to help you get started using the keyword parsers.

Those of you familiar with the Nabialek trick will recognize it’s working under the hood. What you can achieve with the keywords parser can also be achieved with the Nabialek trick but not always as elegantly or as efficiently.

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Feb 28

When using expectation points, a parsing failure results in an exception that generically indicates the failure, but probably doesn’t explain the problem in the most meaningful way. It is possible to attach an error handler to react to the failed match in a more specialized way:

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Nov 13

Jeroen Habraken (a.k.a VeXocide) sent an article about parsing escaped strings using Qi, which we happily publish for everybody to read. Thanks Jeroen!

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Mar 11

I have a mixed relationship with variant…

I just wrote a parser for S-expressions (that will be the basis of ASTs and intermediate types in my planned “write-a-compiler” article series). The parser itself is easy, but as always, I spent more time on the underlying data structures.

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Mar 05

Tracking the Input Position While Parsing

By Peter Schüller Advanced, Beginner, Qi Example Comments Off on Tracking the Input Position While Parsing

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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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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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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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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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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Nov 20

Creating Your Own Parser Component for Spirit.Qi

By Hartmut Kaiser Qi Example Comments Off on Creating Your Own Parser Component for Spirit.Qi

Several people have been asking the question of how it would be possible to access the current iterator position from a semantic action. Different solutions have been proposed, all of them somehow abusing the predefined Qi directive raw[] which normally exposes as its attribute the pair of iterators pointing to the range in the input stream matched by the embedded parser. I thought this to be a nice incentive to write about how you can create your own parser components.

See full article here.

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Nov 17

Zero to 60 MPH in 2 seconds!

By Joel de Guzman Qi Example Comments Off on Zero to 60 MPH in 2 seconds!

Wanna make a blazingly fast rule? Use BOOST_AUTO! Check it out here. The code defines a named rule using C++0x auto when available and falls back to some template wizardry on older compilers.

See full article here.

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Nov 17

Nabialek trick

By Joel de Guzman Qi Example Comments Off on Nabialek trick

This sample is a port of the original “Nabialek trick” from classic Spirit.

See full article here.

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Nov 15

Parsing a List of Key-Value Pairs Using Spirit.Qi

By Hartmut Kaiser Qi Example Comments Off on Parsing a List of Key-Value Pairs Using Spirit.Qi

One of the goals of this blog is to provide shrink wrapped solutions for small everyday parsing and output generation problems. We hope to show how Spirit may be used to simplify the life for you as a C++ programmer related to data conversion problems from some external representation to your internal data structures and vice versa.

See full article here.

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