Tutorials and issues on all aspects of creating software to analyse code
HTML is a markup language with a simple structure. It would be quite easy to build a parser for HTML with a parser generator. Actually, you may not need even to do that, if you choose a popular parser generator, like ANTLR. That is because there are already available grammars ready to be used. HTML […]
The EBNF is the most commonly used formalism to describe the structure of languages. In this article we are going to see: What the EBNF Examples of grammars defined with EBNF How we can define a grammar using EBNF A few things to consider when using EBNF How to use EBNF in practice today A summary […]
This is an article similar to a previous one we wrote: Parsing in Java, so the introduction is the same. Skip to chapter 3 if you have already read it. If you need to parse a language, or document, from Python there are fundamentally three ways to solve the problem: use an existing library supporting […]
This is an article similar to a previous one we wrote: Parsing in Java, so the introduction is the same. Skip to chapter 3 if you have already read it. If you need to parse a language, or document, from JavaScript there are fundamentally three ways to solve the problem: use an existing library supporting […]
This is an article similar to a previous one we wrote: Parsing in Java, so the introduction is the same. Skip to chapter 3 if you have already read it. If you need to parse a language, or document, from C# there are fundamentally three ways to solve the problem: use an existing library supporting […]
If you need to parse a language, or document, from Java there are fundamentally three ways to solve the problem: use an existing library supporting that specific language: for example a library to parse XML building your own custom parser by hand a tool or library to generate a parser: for example ANTLR, that you can […]
Parsers are powerful tools, and using ANTLR you could write all sort of parsers, usable from many different languages. In this complete tutorial we are going to: explain the basics: what a parser is, what it can be used for see how to setup ANTLR to be used from Javascript, Python, Java and C# discuss […]
Everybody loves ANTLR, but sometimes it may be overkill. On the other hand, a regular expression just doesn’t cut it or it may be too complicated to maintain. What a developer can do in such cases ? He uses Sprache. As its creators say: Sprache is a simple, lightweight library for constructing parsers directly in […]
I am a Language Engineer: I use several tools to define and process languages. Among other tools I use ANTLR: it is simple, it is flexible, I can build things around it. However I find myself rebuilding similar tools around ANTLR for different projects. I see two problems with that: ANTLR is a very good […]
Itemis did it again: they just released a new very cool plugin for Jetbrains MPS. This one permits to define new tree editors. They look like this: In this post we are going to see: how to use ANTLR parsers inside MPS how to represent the parsed AST using the tree notation In particular we […]
We can design parsers for new languages, or rewrite parsers for existing languages built in house.
On top of parsers we can then help building interpreters, compilers, code generators, documentation generators, or translators (code converters) to other languages.