Parsley Tutorial Part I: Basics and Syntax

From Regular Expressions To Grammars

Parsley is a pattern matching and parsing tool for Python programmers.

Most Python programmers are familiar with regular expressions, as provided by Python’s re module. To use it, you provide a string that describes the pattern you want to match, and your input.

For example:

>>> import re
>>> x = re.compile("a(b|c)d+e")
>>> x.match("abddde")
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x7f587af54af8>

You can do exactly the same sort of thing in Parsley:

>>> import parsley
>>> x = parsley.makeGrammar("foo = 'a' ('b' | 'c') 'd'+ 'e'", {})
>>> x("abdde").foo()
'e'

From this small example, a couple differences between regular expressions and Parsley grammars can be seen:

Parsley Grammars Have Named Rules

A Parsley grammar can have many rules, and each has a name. The example above has a single rule named foo. Rules can call each other; calling rules in Parsley works like calling functions in Python. Here is another way to write the grammar above:

foo = 'a' baz 'd'+ 'e'
baz = 'b' | 'c'

Parsley Grammars Are Expressions

Calling match for a regular expression returns a match object if the match succeeds or None if it fails. Parsley parsers return the value of last expression in the rule. Behind the scenes, Parsley turns each rule in your grammar into Python methods. In pseudo-Python code, it looks something like this:

def foo(self):
    match('a')
    self.baz()
    match_one_or_more('d')
    return match('e')

def baz(self):
    return match('b') or match('c')

The value of the last expression in the rule is what the rule returns. This is why our example returns ‘e’.

The similarities to regular expressions pretty much end here, though. Having multiple named rules composed of expressions makes for a much more powerful tool, and now we’re going to look at some more features that go even further.

Rules Can Embed Python Expressions

Since these rules just turn into Python code eventually, we can stick some Python code into them ourselves. This is particularly useful for changing the return value of a rule. The Parsley expression for this is ->. We can also bind the results of expressions to variable names and use them in Python code. So things like this are possible:

x = parsley.makeGrammar("""
foo = 'a':one baz:two 'd'+ 'e' -> (one, two)
baz = 'b' | 'c'
""", {})
print x("abdde").foo()

('a', 'b')

Literal match expressions like ‘a’ return the character they match. Using a colon and a variable name after an expression is like assignment in Python. As a result, we can use those names in a Python expression - in this case, creating a tuple.

Another way to use Python code in a rule is to write custom tests for matching. Sometimes it’s more convenient to write some Python that determines if a rule matches than to stick to Parsley expressions alone. For those cases, we can use ?(). Here, we use the builtin rule anything to match a single character, then a Python predicate to decide if it’s the one we want:

digit = anything:x ?(x in '0123456789') -> x

This rule digit will match any decimal digit. We need the -> x on the end to return the character rather than the value of the predicate expression, which is just True.

Repeated Matches Make Lists

Like regular expressions, Parsley supports repeating matches. You can match an expression zero or more times with ‘* ‘, one or more times with ‘+’, and a specific number of times with ‘{n, m}’ or just ‘{n}’. Since all expressions in Parsley return a value, these repetition operators return a list containing each match they made.

x = parsley.makeGrammar("""
digit = anything:x ?(x in '0123456789') -> x
number = digit+
""", {})
print x("314159").number()

['3', '1', '4', '1', '5', '9']

The number rule repeatedly matches digit and collects the matches into a list. This gets us part way to turning a string like 314159 into an integer. All we need now is to turn the list back into a string and call int():

x = parsley.makeGrammar("""
digit = anything:x ?(x in '0123456789') -> x
number = digit+:ds -> int(''.join(ds))
""", {})
print x("8675309").number()

8675309

Collecting Chunks Of Input

If it seemed kind of strange to break our input string up into a list and then reassemble it into a string using join, you’re not alone. Parsley has a shortcut for this since it’s a common case: you can use <> around a rule to make it return the slice of input it consumes, ignoring the actual return value of the rule. For example:

x = parsley.makeGrammar("""
digit = anything:x ?(x in '0123456789')
number = <digit+>:ds -> int(ds)
""", {})
print x("11235").number()

11235

Here, <digit+> returns the string “11235”, since that’s the portion of the input that digit+ matched. (In this case it’s the entire input, but we’ll see some more complex cases soon.) Since it ignores the list returned by digit+, leaving the -> x out of digit doesn’t change the result.

Building A Calculator

Now let’s look at using these rules in a more complicated parser. We have support for parsing numbers; let’s do addition, as well.

x = parsley.makeGrammar("""
digit = anything:x ?(x in '0123456789')
number = <digit+>:ds -> int(ds)
expr = number:left ( '+' number:right -> left + right
                   | -> left)
""", {})
print x("17+34").expr()
print x("18").expr()

51
18

Parentheses group expressions just like in Python. the ‘|‘ operator is like or in Python - it short-circuits. It tries each expression until it finds one that matches. For “17+34”, the number rule matches “17”, then Parsley tries to match + followed by another number. Since “+” and “34” are the next things in the input, those match, and it then runs the Python expression left + right and returns its value. For the input “18” it does the same, but + does not match, so Parsley tries the next thing after |. Since this is just a Python expression, the match succeeds and the number 18 is returned.

Now let’s add subtraction:

digit = anything:x ?(x in '0123456789')
number = <digit+>:ds -> int(ds)
expr = number:left ( '+' number:right -> left + right
                   | '-' number:right -> left - right
                   | -> left)

This will accept things like ‘5-4’ now.

Since parsing numbers is so common and useful, Parsley actually has ‘digit’ as a builtin rule, so we don’t even need to define it ourselves. We’ll leave it out in further examples and rely on the version Parsley provides.

Normally we like to allow whitespace in our expressions, so let’s add some support for spaces:

number = <digit+>:ds -> int(ds)
ws = ' '*
expr = number:left ws ('+' ws number:right -> left + right
                      |'-' ws number:right -> left - right
                      | -> left)

Now we can handle “17 +34”, “2 - 1”, etc.

We could go ahead and add multiplication and division here (and hopefully it’s obvious how that would work), but let’s complicate things further and allow multiple operations in our expressions – things like “1 - 2 + 3”.

There’s a couple different ways to do this. Possibly the easiest is to build a list of numbers and operations, then do the math.:

x = parsley.makeGrammar("""
number = <digit+>:ds -> int(ds)
ws = ' '*
add = '+' ws number:n -> ('+', n)
sub = '-' ws number:n -> ('-', n)
addsub = ws (add | sub)
expr = number:left (addsub+:right -> right
                   | -> left)
""", {})
print x("1 + 2 - 3").expr()

[('+', 2), ('-, 3)]

Oops, this is only half the job done. We’re collecting the operators and values, but now we need to do the actual calculation. The easiest way to do it is probably to write a Python function and call it from inside the grammar.

So far we have been passing an empty dict as the second argument to makeGrammar. This is a dict of variable bindings that can be used in Python expressions in the grammar. So we can pass Python objects, such as functions, this way:

def calculate(start, pairs):
    result = start
    for op, value in pairs:
        if op == '+':
            result += value
        elif op == '-':
            result -= value
    return result
x = parsley.makeGrammar("""
number = <digit+>:ds -> int(ds)
ws = ' '*
add = '+' ws number:n -> ('+', n)
sub = '-' ws number:n -> ('-', n)
addsub = ws (add | sub)
expr = number:left (addsub+:right -> calculate(left, right)
                   | -> left)
""", {"calculate": calculate})
print x("4 + 5 - 6").expr()

3

Introducing this function lets us simplify even further: instead of using addsub+, we can use addsub*, since calculate(left, []) will return left – so now expr becomes:

expr = number:left addsub*:right -> calculate(left, right)

So now let’s look at adding multiplication and division. Here, we run into precedence rules: should “4 * 5 + 6” give us 26, or 44? The traditional choice is for multiplication and division to take precedence over addition and subtraction, so the answer should be 26. We’ll resolve this by making sure multiplication and division happen before addition and subtraction are considered:

def calculate(start, pairs):
    result = start
    for op, value in pairs:
        if op == '+':
            result += value
        elif op == '-':
            result -= value
        elif op == '*':
            result *= value
        elif op == '/':
            result /= value
    return result
x = parsley.makeGrammar("""
number = <digit+>:ds -> int(ds)
ws = ' '*
add = '+' ws expr2:n -> ('+', n)
sub = '-' ws expr2:n -> ('-', n)
mul = '*' ws number:n -> ('*', n)
div = '/' ws number:n -> ('/', n)

addsub = ws (add | sub)
muldiv = ws (mul | div)

expr = expr2:left addsub*:right -> calculate(left, right)
expr2 = number:left muldiv*:right -> calculate(left, right)
""", {"calculate": calculate})
print x("4 * 5 + 6").expr()

26

Notice particularly that add, sub, and expr all call the expr2 rule now where they called number before. This means that all the places where a number was expected previously, a multiplication or division expression can appear instead.

Finally let’s add parentheses, so you can override the precedence and write “4 * (5 + 6)” when you do want 44. We’ll do this by adding a value rule that accepts either a number or an expression in parentheses, and replace existing calls to number with calls to value.

def calculate(start, pairs):
    result = start
    for op, value in pairs:
        if op == '+':
            result += value
        elif op == '-':
            result -= value
        elif op == '*':
            result *= value
        elif op == '/':
            result /= value
    return result
x = parsley.makeGrammar("""
number = <digit+>:ds -> int(ds)
parens = '(' ws expr:e ws ')' -> e
value = number | parens
ws = ' '*
add = '+' ws expr2:n -> ('+', n)
sub = '-' ws expr2:n -> ('-', n)
mul = '*' ws value:n -> ('*', n)
div = '/' ws value:n -> ('/', n)

addsub = ws (add | sub)
muldiv = ws (mul | div)

expr = expr2:left addsub*:right -> calculate(left, right)
expr2 = value:left muldiv*:right -> calculate(left, right)
""", {"calculate": calculate})

print x("4 * (5 + 6) + 1").expr()

45

And there you have it: a four-function calculator with precedence and parentheses.