pgn-reader

A fast non-allocating and streaming reader for chess games in PGN notation. Experimental.

Design priorities

In this order:

1. Safe to run on untrusted inputs. No panics, no denial of service (linear time complexity).
2. Correct on valid PGNs.
3. Performance. One of the fastest PGN parsers in any language.
4. Reasonable behavior on invalid PGNs. Common quirks may be supported, but only if there is essentially no performance cost.
5. Usability. Basic operation can be quite verbose and users need to bring their own in-memory representation for games.

Introduction

Reader parses games and calls methods of a user provided Visitor. Implementing custom visitors allows for maximum flexibility:

• The reader itself does not allocate (besides a single fixed-size buffer). The visitor can decide if and how to represent games in memory.
• The reader does not validate move legality. This allows implementing support for custom chess variants, or delaying move validation.
• The visitor can short-circuit and let the reader use a fast path for skipping games or variations.

Example

A visitor that counts the number of syntactically valid moves in the mainline of each game.

use std::{io, ops::ControlFlow};
use pgn_reader::{Visitor, Reader, SanPlus};

struct MoveCounter;

impl Visitor for MoveCounter {
    type Tags = ();
    type Movetext = usize;
    type Output = usize;

    fn begin_tags(&mut self) -> ControlFlow<Self::Output, Self::Tags> {
        ControlFlow::Continue(())
    }

    fn begin_movetext(&mut self, _tags: Self::Tags) -> ControlFlow<Self::Output, Self::Movetext> {
        ControlFlow::Continue(0)
    }

    fn san(&mut self, movetext: &mut Self::Movetext, _san_plus: SanPlus) -> ControlFlow<Self::Output> {
        *movetext += 1;
        ControlFlow::Continue(())
    }

    fn end_game(&mut self, movetext: Self::Movetext) -> Self::Output {
        movetext
    }
}

fn main() -> io::Result<()> {
    let pgn = b"1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 (2. f4)
                { game paused due to bad weather }
                2... Nf6 *";

    let mut reader = Reader::new(io::Cursor::new(&pgn));

    let moves = reader.read_game(&mut MoveCounter)?;
    assert_eq!(moves, Some(4));

    Ok(())
}

Documentation

Read the documentation

Benchmarks (v0.28.0)

Run with lichess_db_standard_rated_2018-10.pgn, a very orderly PGN file with additional headers and many small comments for evaluations and clock times, containing 24,784,600 games, 50,307 MiB uncompressed on tmpfs, AMD Ryzen 9 9950X @ 4.3 GHz, compiled with Rust 1.88.0:

License

pgn-reader is licensed under the GPL-3.0 (or any later version at your option).