parsimonious 0.11.0
(Soon to be) the fastest pure-Python PEG parser I could muster
License: MIT
Keywords: parse, parser, parsing, peg, packrat, grammar, language

============
Parsimonious
============

Parsimonious aims to be the fastest arbitrary-lookahead parser written in pure
Python—and the most usable. It's based on parsing expression grammars (PEGs),
which means you feed it a simplified sort of EBNF notation. Parsimonious was
designed to undergird a MediaWiki parser that wouldn't take 5 seconds or a GB
of RAM to do one page, but it's applicable to all sorts of languages.

:Code:    https://github.com/erikrose/parsimonious/
:Issues:  https://github.com/erikrose/parsimonious/issues
:License: MIT License (MIT)
:Package: https://pypi.org/project/parsimonious/


Goals
=====

* Speed
* Frugal RAM use
* Minimalistic, understandable, idiomatic Python code
* Readable grammars
* Extensible grammars
* Complete test coverage
* Separation of concerns. Some Python parsing kits mix recognition with
  instructions about how to turn the resulting tree into some kind of other
  representation. This is limiting when you want to do several different things
  with a tree: for example, render wiki markup to HTML *or* to text.
* Good error reporting. I want the parser to work *with* me as I develop a
  grammar.


Install
=======

To install Parsimonious, run::

    $ pip install parsimonious


Example Usage
=============

Here's how to build a simple grammar:

.. code:: python

    >>> from parsimonious.grammar import Grammar
    >>> grammar = Grammar(
    ...     """
    ...     bold_text  = bold_open text bold_close
    ...     text       = ~"[A-Z 0-9]*"i
    ...     bold_open  = "(("
    ...     bold_close = "))"
    ...     """)

You can have forward references and even right recursion; it's all taken care
of by the grammar compiler. The first rule is taken to be the default start
symbol, but you can override that.

Next, let's parse something and get an abstract syntax tree:

.. code:: python

    >>> print(grammar.parse('((bold stuff))'))
    <Node called "bold_text" matching "((bold stuff))">
        <Node called "bold_open" matching "((">
        <RegexNode called "text" matching "bold stuff">
        <Node called "bold_close" matching "))">

You'd typically then use a ``nodes.NodeVisitor`` subclass (see below) to walk
the tree and do something useful with it.

Another example would be to implement a parser for ``.ini``-files. Consider the following:

.. code:: python

    grammar = Grammar(
        r"""
        expr        = (entry / emptyline)*
        entry       = section pair*

        section     = lpar word rpar ws
        pair        = key equal value ws?

        key         = word+
        value       = (word / quoted)+
        word        = ~r"[-\w]+"
        quoted      = ~'"[^\"]+"'
        equal       = ws? "=" ws?
        lpar        = "["
        rpar        = "]"
        ws          = ~r"\s*"
        emptyline   = ws+
        """
    )


We could now implement a subclass of ``NodeVisitor`` like so:

.. code:: python

    class IniVisitor(NodeVisitor):
        def visit_expr(self, node, visited_children):
            """ Returns the overall output. """
            output = {}
            for child in visited_children:
                output.update(child[0])
            return output

        def visit_entry(self, node, visited_children):
            """ Makes a dict of the section (as key) and the key/value pairs. """
            key, values = visited_children
            return {key: dict(values)}

        def visit_section(self, node, visited_children):
            """ Gets the section name. """
            _, section, *_ = visited_children
            return section.text

        def visit_pair(self, node, visited_children):
            """ Gets each key/value pair, returns a tuple. """
            key, _, value, *_ = node.children
            return key.text, value.text

        def generic_visit(self, node, visited_children):
            """ The generic visit method. """
            return visited_children or node

And call it like that:

.. code:: python

    from parsimonious.grammar import Grammar
    from parsimonious.nodes import NodeVisitor

    data = """[section]
    somekey = somevalue
    someotherkey=someothervalue

    [anothersection]
    key123 = "what the heck?"
    key456="yet another one here"

    """

    tree = grammar.parse(data)

    iv = IniVisitor()
    output = iv.visit(tree)
    print(output)

This would yield

.. code:: python

    {'section': {'somekey': 'somevalue', 'someotherkey': 'someothervalue'}, 'anothersection': {'key123': '"what the heck?"', 'key456': '"yet another one here"'}}

Status
======

* Everything that exists works. Test coverage is good.
* I don't plan on making any backward-incompatible changes to the rule syntax
  in the future, so you can write grammars with confidence.
* It may be slow and use a lot of RAM; I haven't measured either yet. However,
  I have yet to begin optimizing in earnest.
* Error reporting is now in place. ``repr`` methods of expressions, grammars,
  and nodes are clear and helpful as well. The ``Grammar`` ones are
  even round-trippable!
* The grammar extensibility story is underdeveloped at the moment. You should
  be able to extend a grammar by simply concatenating more rules onto the
  existing ones; later rules of the same name should override previous ones.
  However, this is untested and may not be the final story.
* Sphinx docs are coming, but the docstrings are quite useful now.
* Note that there may be API changes until we get to 1.0, so be sure to pin to
  the version you're using.

Coming Soon
-----------

* Optimizations to make Parsimonious worthy of its name
* Tighter RAM use
* Better-thought-out grammar extensibility story
* Amazing grammar debugging


A Little About PEG Parsers
==========================

PEG parsers don't draw a distinction between lexing and parsing; everything is
done at once. As a result, there is no lookahead limit, as there is with, for
instance, Yacc. And, due to both of these properties, PEG grammars are easier
to write: they're basically just a more practical dialect of EBNF. With
caching, they take O(grammar size * text length) memory (though I plan to do
better), but they run in O(text length) time.

More Technically
----------------

PEGs can describe a superset of *LL(k)* languages, any deterministic *LR(k)*
language, and many others—including some that aren't context-free
(http://www.brynosaurus.com/pub/lang/peg.pdf). They can also deal with what
would be ambiguous languages if described in canonical EBNF. They do this by
trading the ``|`` alternation operator for the ``/`` operator, which works the
same except that it makes priority explicit: ``a / b / c`` first tries matching
``a``. If that fails, it tries ``b``, and, failing that, moves on to ``c``.
Thus, ambiguity is resolved by always yielding the first successful recognition.


Writing Grammars
================

Grammars are defined by a series of rules. The syntax should be familiar to
anyone who uses regexes or reads programming language manuals. An example will
serve best:

.. code:: python

    my_grammar = Grammar(r"""
        styled_text = bold_text / italic_text
        bold_text   = "((" text "))"
        italic_text = "''" text "''"
        text        = ~"[A-Z 0-9]*"i
        """)

You can wrap a rule across multiple lines if you like; the syntax is very
forgiving.

If you want to save your grammar into a separate file, you should name it using
``.ppeg`` extension.


Syntax Reference
----------------

====================    ========================================================
``"some literal"``      Used to quote literals. Backslash escaping and Python
                        conventions for "raw" and Unicode strings help support
                        fiddly characters.

``b"some literal"``     A bytes literal. Using bytes literals and regular
                        expressions allows your grammar to parse binary files.
                        Note that all literals and regular expressions must be
                        of the same type within a grammar. In grammars that
                        process bytestrings, you should make the grammar string
                        an ``r"""string"""`` so that byte literals like ``\xff``
                        work correctly.

[space]                 Sequences are made out of space- or tab-delimited
                        things. ``a b c`` matches spots where those 3
                        terms appear in that order.

``a / b / c``           Alternatives. The first to succeed of ``a / b / c``
                        wins.

``thing?``              An optional expression. This is greedy, always consuming
                        ``thing`` if it exists.

``&thing``              A lookahead assertion. Ensures ``thing`` matches at the
                        current position but does not consume it.

``!thing``              A negative lookahead assertion. Matches if ``thing``
                        isn't found here. Doesn't consume any text.

``things*``             Zero or more things. This is greedy, always consuming as
                        many repetitions as it can.

``things+``             One or more things. This is greedy, always consuming as
                        many repetitions as it can.

``~r"regex"ilmsuxa``    Regexes have ``~`` in front and are quoted like
                        literals. Any flags_ (``asilmx``) follow the end quotes
                        as single chars. Regexes are good for representing
                        character classes (``[a-z0-9]``) and optimizing for
                        speed. The downside is that they won't be able to take
                        advantage of our fancy debugging, once we get that
                        working. Ultimately, I'd like to deprecate explicit
                        regexes and instead have Parsimonious dynamically build
                        them out of simpler primitives. Parsimonious uses the
                        regex_ library instead of the built-in re module.

``~br"regex"``          A bytes regex; required if your grammar parses
                        bytestrings.

``(things)``            Parentheses are used for grouping, like in every other
                        language.

``thing{n}``            Exactly ``n`` repetitions of ``thing``.

``thing{n,m}``          Between ``n`` and ``m`` repititions (inclusive.)

``thing{,m}``           At most ``m`` repetitions of ``thing``.

``thing{n,}``           At least ``n`` repetitions of ``thing``.

====================    ========================================================

.. _flags: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/regex.html#compilation
.. _regex: https://github.com/mrabarnett/mrab-regex

Optimizing Grammars
===================

Don't Repeat Expressions
------------------------

If you need a ``~"[a-z0-9]"i`` at two points in your grammar, don't type it
twice. Make it a rule of its own, and reference it from wherever you need it.
You'll get the most out of the caching this way, since cache lookups are by
expression object identity (for speed).

Even if you have an expression that's very simple, not repeating it will
save RAM, as there can, at worst, be a cached int for every char in the text
you're parsing. In the future, we may identify repeated subexpressions
automatically and factor them up while building the grammar.

How much should you shove into one regex, versus how much should you break them
up to not repeat yourself? That's a fine balance and worthy of benchmarking.
More stuff jammed into a regex will execute faster, because it doesn't have to
run any Python between pieces, but a broken-up one will give better cache
performance if the individual pieces are re-used elsewhere. If the pieces of a
regex aren't used anywhere else, by all means keep the whole thing together.


Quantifiers
-----------

Bring your ``?`` and ``*`` quantifiers up to the highest level you
can. Otherwise, lower-level patterns could succeed but be empty and put a bunch
of useless nodes in your tree that didn't really match anything.


Processing Parse Trees
======================

A parse tree has a node for each expression matched, even if it matched a
zero-length string, like ``"thing"?`` might.

The ``NodeVisitor`` class provides an inversion-of-control framework for
walking a tree and returning a new construct (tree, string, or whatever) based
on it. For now, have a look at its docstrings for more detail. There's also a
good example in ``grammar.RuleVisitor``. Notice how we take advantage of nodes'
iterability by using tuple unpacks in the formal parameter lists:

.. code:: python

    def visit_or_term(self, or_term, (slash, _, term)):
        ...

For reference, here is the production the above unpacks::

    or_term = "/" _ term

When something goes wrong in your visitor, you get a nice error like this::

    [normal traceback here...]
    VisitationException: 'Node' object has no attribute 'foo'

    Parse tree:
    <Node called "rules" matching "number = ~"[0-9]+"">  <-- *** We were here. ***
        <Node matching "number = ~"[0-9]+"">
            <Node called "rule" matching "number = ~"[0-9]+"">
                <Node matching "">
                <Node called "label" matching "number">
                <Node matching " ">
                    <Node called "_" matching " ">
                <Node matching "=">
                <Node matching " ">
                    <Node called "_" matching " ">
                <Node called "rhs" matching "~"[0-9]+"">
                    <Node called "term" matching "~"[0-9]+"">
                        <Node called "atom" matching "~"[0-9]+"">
                            <Node called "regex" matching "~"[0-9]+"">
                                <Node matching "~">
                                <Node called "literal" matching ""[0-9]+"">
                                <Node matching "">
                <Node matching "">
                <Node called "eol" matching "
                ">
        <Node matching "">

The parse tree is tacked onto the exception, and the node whose visitor method
raised the error is pointed out.

Why No Streaming Tree Processing?
---------------------------------

Some have asked why we don't process the tree as we go, SAX-style. There are
two main reasons:

1. It wouldn't work. With a PEG parser, no parsing decision is final until the
   whole text is parsed. If we had to change a decision, we'd have to backtrack
   and redo the SAX-style interpretation as well, which would involve
   reconstituting part of the AST and quite possibly scuttling whatever you
   were doing with the streaming output. (Note that some bursty SAX-style
   processing may be possible in the future if we use cuts.)

2. It interferes with the ability to derive multiple representations from the
   AST: for example, turning wiki markup into first HTML and then text.


Future Directions
=================

Rule Syntax Changes
-------------------

* Maybe support left-recursive rules like PyMeta, if anybody cares.
* Ultimately, I'd like to get rid of explicit regexes and break them into more
  atomic things like character classes. Then we can dynamically compile bits
  of the grammar into regexes as necessary to boost speed.

Optimizations
-------------

* Make RAM use almost constant by automatically inserting "cuts", as described
  in
  http://ialab.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/~mizusima/publications/paste513-mizushima.pdf.
  This would also improve error reporting, as we wouldn't backtrack out of
  everything informative before finally failing.
* Find all the distinct subexpressions, and unify duplicates for a better cache
  hit ratio.
* Think about having the user (optionally) provide some representative input
  along with a grammar. We can then profile against it, see which expressions
  are worth caching, and annotate the grammar. Perhaps there will even be
  positions at which a given expression is more worth caching. Or we could keep
  a count of how many times each cache entry has been used and evict the most
  useless ones as RAM use grows.
* We could possibly compile the grammar into VM instructions, like in "A
  parsing machine for PEGs" by Medeiros.
* If the recursion gets too deep in practice, use trampolining to dodge it.

Niceties
--------

* Pijnu has a raft of tree manipulators. I don't think I want all of them, but
  a judicious subset might be nice. Don't get into mixing formatting with tree
  manipulation.
  https://github.com/erikrose/pijnu/blob/master/library/node.py#L333. PyPy's
  parsing lib exposes a sane subset:
  http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/rlib.html#tree-transformations.


Version History
===============

0.11.0
  * Correctly handle `/` expressions with multiple terms in a row. (lucaswiman)
  * Start using pyproject.toml. (Kolanich)
  * Add a ``ParsimoniousError`` exception base class. (Kevin Kirsche)
  * Fall back to ``re`` when the ``regex`` lib is not available. (Pavel Kirienko)

0.10.0
  * Fix infinite recursion in __eq__ in some cases. (FelisNivalis)
  * Improve error message in left-recursive rules. (lucaswiman)
  * Add support for range ``{min,max}`` repetition expressions (righthandabacus)
  * Fix bug in ``*`` and ``+`` for token grammars (lucaswiman)
  * Add support for grammars on bytestrings (lucaswiman)
  * Fix LazyReference resolution bug #134 (righthandabacus)
  * ~15% speedup on benchmarks with a faster node cache (ethframe)

  .. warning::

      This release makes backward-incompatible changes:

      * Fix precedence of string literal modifiers ``u/r/b``.
        This will break grammars with no spaces between a
        reference and a string literal. (lucaswiman)


0.9.0
  * Add support for Python 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10 (righthandabacus, Lonnen)
  * Drop support for Python 2.x, 3.3, 3.4 (righthandabacus, Lonnen)
  * Remove six and go all in on Python 3 idioms (Lonnen)
  * Replace re with regex for improved handling of unicode characters
    in regexes (Oderjunkie)
  * Dropped nose for unittest (swayson)
  * `Grammar.__repr__()` now correctly escapes backslashes (ingolemo)
  * Custom rules can now be class methods in addition to
    functions (James Addison)
  * Make the ascii flag available in the regex syntax (Roman Inflianskas)

0.8.1
  * Switch to a function-style ``print`` in the benchmark tests so we work
    cleanly as a dependency on Python 3. (Edward Betts)

0.8.0
  * Make Grammar iteration ordered, making the ``__repr__`` more like the
    original input. (Lucas Wiman)
  * Improve text representation and error messages for anonymous
    subexpressions. (Lucas Wiman)
  * Expose BadGrammar and VisitationError as top-level imports.
  * No longer crash when you try to compare a Node to an instance of a
    different class. (Esben Sonne)
  * Pin ``six`` at 1.9.0 to ensure we have ``python_2_unicode_compatible``.
    (Sam Raker)
  * Drop Python 2.6 support.

0.7.0
  * Add experimental token-based parsing, via TokenGrammar class, for those
    operating on pre-lexed streams of tokens. This can, for example, help parse
    indentation-sensitive languages that use the "off-side rule", like Python.
    (Erik Rose)
  * Common codebase for Python 2 and 3: no more 2to3 translation step (Mattias
    Urlichs, Lucas Wiman)
  * Drop Python 3.1 and 3.2 support.
  * Fix a bug in ``Grammar.__repr__`` which fails to work on Python 3 since the
    string_escape codec is gone in Python 3. (Lucas Wiman)
  * Don't lose parentheses when printing representations of expressions.
    (Michael Kelly)
  * Make Grammar an immutable mapping (until we add automatic recompilation).
    (Michael Kelly)

0.6.2
  * Make grammar compilation 100x faster. Thanks to dmoisset for the initial
    patch.

0.6.1
  * Fix bug which made the default rule of a grammar invalid when it
    contained a forward reference.

0.6
  .. warning::

      This release makes backward-incompatible changes:

      * The ``default_rule`` arg to Grammar's constructor has been replaced
        with a method, ``some_grammar.default('rule_name')``, which returns a
        new grammar just like the old except with its default rule changed.
        This is to free up the constructor kwargs for custom rules.
      * ``UndefinedLabel`` is no longer a subclass of ``VisitationError``. This
        matters only in the unlikely case that you were catching
        ``VisitationError`` exceptions and expecting to thus also catch
        ``UndefinedLabel``.

  * Add support for "custom rules" in Grammars. These provide a hook for simple
    custom parsing hooks spelled as Python lambdas. For heavy-duty needs,
    you can put in Compound Expressions with LazyReferences as subexpressions,
    and the Grammar will hook them up for optimal efficiency--no calling
    ``__getitem__`` on Grammar at parse time.
  * Allow grammars without a default rule (in cases where there are no string
    rules), which leads to also allowing empty grammars. Perhaps someone
    building up grammars dynamically will find that useful.
  * Add ``@rule`` decorator, allowing grammars to be constructed out of
    notations on ``NodeVisitor`` methods. This saves looking back and forth
    between the visitor and the grammar when there is only one visitor per
    grammar.
  * Add ``parse()`` and ``match()`` convenience methods to ``NodeVisitor``.
    This makes the common case of parsing a string and applying exactly one
    visitor to the AST shorter and simpler.
  * Improve exception message when you forget to declare a visitor method.
  * Add ``unwrapped_exceptions`` attribute to ``NodeVisitor``, letting you
    name certain exceptions which propagate out of visitors without being
    wrapped by ``VisitationError`` exceptions.
  * Expose much more of the library in ``__init__``, making your imports
    shorter.
  * Drastically simplify reference resolution machinery. (Vladimir Keleshev)

0.5
  .. warning::

      This release makes some backward-incompatible changes. See below.

  * Add alpha-quality error reporting. Now, rather than returning ``None``,
    ``parse()`` and ``match()`` raise ``ParseError`` if they don't succeed.
    This makes more sense, since you'd rarely attempt to parse something and
    not care if it succeeds. It was too easy before to forget to check for a
    ``None`` result. ``ParseError`` gives you a human-readable unicode
    representation as well as some attributes that let you construct your own
    custom presentation.
  * Grammar construction now raises ``ParseError`` rather than ``BadGrammar``
    if it can't parse your rules.
  * ``parse()`` now takes an optional ``pos`` argument, like ``match()``.
  * Make the ``_str__()`` method of ``UndefinedLabel`` return the right type.
  * Support splitting rules across multiple lines, interleaving comments,
    putting multiple rules on one line (but don't do that) and all sorts of
    other horrific behavior.
  * Tolerate whitespace after opening parens.
  * Add support for single-quoted literals.

0.4
  * Support Python 3.
  * Fix ``import *`` for ``parsimonious.expressions``.
  * Rewrite grammar compiler so right-recursive rules can be compiled and
    parsing no longer fails in some cases with forward rule references.

0.3
  * Support comments, the ``!`` ("not") operator, and parentheses in grammar
    definition syntax.
  * Change the ``&`` operator to a prefix operator to conform to the original
    PEG syntax. The version in Parsing Techniques was infix, and that's what I
    used as a reference. However, the unary version is more convenient, as it
    lets you spell ``AB & A`` as simply ``A &B``.
  * Take the ``print`` statements out of the benchmark tests.
  * Give Node an evaluate-able ``__repr__``.

0.2
  * Support matching of prefixes and other not-to-the-end slices of strings by
    making ``match()`` public and able to initialize a new cache. Add
    ``match()`` callthrough method to ``Grammar``.
  * Report a ``BadGrammar`` exception (rather than crashing) when there are
    mistakes in a grammar definition.
  * Simplify grammar compilation internals: get rid of superfluous visitor
    methods and factor up repetitive ones. Simplify rule grammar as well.
  * Add ``NodeVisitor.lift_child`` convenience method.
  * Rename ``VisitationException`` to ``VisitationError`` for consistency with
    the standard Python exception hierarchy.
  * Rework ``repr`` and ``str`` values for grammars and expressions. Now they
    both look like rule syntax. Grammars are even round-trippable! This fixes a
    unicode encoding error when printing nodes that had parsed unicode text.
  * Add tox for testing. Stop advertising Python 2.5 support, which never
    worked (and won't unless somebody cares a lot, since it makes Python 3
    support harder).
  * Settle (hopefully) on the term "rule" to mean "the string representation of
    a production". Get rid of the vague, mysterious "DSL".

0.1
  * A rough but useable preview release

Thanks to Wiki Loves Monuments Panama for showing their support with a generous
gift.