Lexical analyzers are quite easy to write when you have regexes. Today I wanted to write a simple general analyzer in Python, and came up with:
import re
import sys
class Token(object):
""" A simple Token structure.
Contains the token type, value and position.
"""
def __init__(self, type, val, pos):
self.type = type
self.val = val
self.pos = pos
def __str__(self):
return '%s(%s) at %s' % (self.type, self.val, self.pos)
class LexerError(Exception):
""" Lexer error exception.
pos:
Position in the input line where the error occurred.
"""
def __init__(self, pos):
self.pos = pos
class Lexer(object):
""" A simple regex-based lexer/tokenizer.
See below for an example of usage.
"""
def __init__(self, rules, skip_whitespace=True):
""" Create a lexer.
rules:
A list of rules. Each rule is a `regex, type`
pair, where `regex` is the regular expression used
to recognize the token and `type` is the type
of the token to return when it's recognized.
skip_whitespace:
If True, whitespace (\s+) will be skipped and not
reported by the lexer. Otherwise, you have to
specify your rules for whitespace, or it will be
flagged as an error.
"""
self.rules = []
for regex, type in rules:
self.rules.append((re.compile(regex), type))
self.skip_whitespace = skip_whitespace
self.re_ws_skip = re.compile('\S')
def input(self, buf):
""" Initialize the lexer with a buffer as input.
"""
self.buf = buf
self.pos = 0
def token(self):
""" Return the next token (a Token object) found in the
input buffer. None is returned if the end of the
buffer was reached.
In case of a lexing error (the current chunk of the
buffer matches no rule), a LexerError is raised with
the position of the error.
"""
if self.pos >= len(self.buf):
return None
else:
if self.skip_whitespace:
m = self.re_ws_skip.search(self.buf[self.pos:])
if m:
self.pos += m.start()
else:
return None
for token_regex, token_type in self.rules:
m = token_regex.match(self.buf[self.pos:])
if m:
value = self.buf[self.pos + m.start():self.pos + m.end()]
tok = Token(token_type, value, self.pos)
self.pos += m.end()
return tok
# if we're here, no rule matched
raise LexerError(self.pos)
def tokens(self):
""" Returns an iterator to the tokens found in the buffer.
"""
while 1:
tok = self.token()
if tok is None: break
yield tok
if __name__ == '__main__':
rules = [
('\d+', 'NUMBER'),
('[a-zA-Z_]\w+', 'IDENTIFIER'),
('\+', 'PLUS'),
('\-', 'MINUS'),
('\*', 'MULTIPLY'),
('\/', 'DIVIDE'),
('\(', 'LP'),
('\)', 'RP'),
('=', 'EQUALS'),
]
lx = Lexer(rules, skip_whitespace=True)
lx.input('erw = _abc + 12*(R4-623902) ')
try:
for tok in lx.tokens():
print tok
except LexerError, err:
print 'LexerError at position', err.pos
It works just fine, but I'm a bit worried that it's too inefficient. Are there any regex tricks that will allow me to write it in a more efficient / elegant way ?
Specifically, is there a way to avoid looping over all the regex rules linearly to find one that fits?
