piston_meta

A DSL parsing library for human readable text documents

Documentation

Why Piston-Meta?

self-syntax

Notice: Parsing is supported but composing is not implemented yet.

"Hello world" in Piston-Meta

Piston-Meta allows parsing into any structure implementing MetaReader, for example Tokenizer. Tokenizer stores the tree structure in a flat Vec with "start node" and "end node" items.

extern crate piston_meta;

use piston_meta::*;

fn main() {
    let text = r#"say "Hello world!""#;
    let rules = r#"1 "rule" ["say" w! t?"foo"]"#;
    // Parse rules with meta language and convert to rules for parsing text.
    let rules = bootstrap::convert(
        &parse(&bootstrap::rules(), rules).unwrap(),
        &mut vec![] // stores ignored meta data
    ).unwrap();
    let data = parse(&rules, text);
    match data {
        Ok(data) => {
            assert_eq!(data.len(), 1);
            if let &MetaData::String(_, ref hello) = &data[0].1 {
                println!("{}", hello);
            }
        }
        Err((range, err)) => {
            // Report the error to standard error output.
            ParseStdErr::new(&text).error(range, err);
        }
    }
}

How does it work?

1. Piston-Meta contains composable rules that can parse most human readable text formats.
2. Piston-Meta knows how to parse and convert to its own rules, known as "bootstrapping".
3. Therefore, you can tell Piston-Meta how to parse other text formats using a meta language!