stenin-nikita/php-yacc

A PHP YACC Parser-Generator library

PHP-Yacc

, _(*1)

This is a port of kmyacc into PHP. It is a parser-generator, meaning it takes a YACC grammar file and generates a parser file., _(*2)

A Direct Port (For Now)

Right now, this is a direct port. Meaning that it works exactly like kmyacc. Looking in the examples, you can see that this means that you must supply a "parser template" in addition to the grammar., _(*3)

Longer term, we want to add simplifying functionality. We will always support providing a template, but we will offer a series of default templates for common use-cases., _(*4)

Basic Usage

Require this package with composer:, _(*5)

composer require stenin-nikita/php-yacc

Run command in console:, _(*6)

vendor/bin/phpyacc -s "/path/to/template" -o "/path/to/output" -c "MyParser" "/path/to/grammar.phpy"

What can I do with this?

You can parse most structured and unstructured grammars. There are some gotchas to LALR(1) parsers that you need to be aware of (for example, Shift/Shift conflicts and Shift/Reduce conflicts). But those are beyond this simple intro., _(*7)

How does it work?

I don't know. I just ported the code until it worked correctly., _(*8)

YACC Grammar

That's way beyond the scope of this documentation, but checkout The YACC page here for some info., _(*9)

Over time we will document the grammar more..., _(*10)

How do I use it?

For now, check out the examples folder. The current state of the CLI tool will change, so any usage today should please provide feedback and use-cases so that we can better design the tooling support., _(*11)

Why did you do this?

Many projects have the need for parsers (and therefore parser-generators). Nikita's PHP-Parser is one tool that uses kmyacc to generate its parser. There are many other projects out there that either use hand-written parsers, or use kmyacc or another parser-generator., _(*12)

Unfortunately, not many parser-generators exist for PHP. And those that do exist I have found to be rigid or not powerful enough to parse PHP itself., _(*13)

This project is an aim to resolve that., _(*14)

Performance

There's a TON of performance optimizations possible here. The original code was a direct port, so some structures are definitely sub-optimal. Over time we will improve the performance., _(*15)

However, this will always be at least a slightly-slow process. Generating a parser requires a lot of resources, so should never happen inside of a web request., _(*16)

Using the generated parser however should be quite fast (the generated parser is fairly well optimized already)., _(*17)

What's left to do?

A bunch of things. Here's the wishlist:, _(*18)

• Refactor to make conventions consistent (some parts currently use camel-case, some parts use snakeCase, etc).
• Performance tuning
• Unit test as much as possible
• Document as much as possible (It's a complicated series of algorithms with no source documentation in either project).
• Redesign the CLI binary and how it operates
• Decide whether multi-language support is worth while, or if we should just move to only PHP codegen support.
• Add default templates and parser implementations
  • At least one of which generates an "AST" by default, similar to Ruby's Treetop library
• Build a reasonably performant lexer-generator (very likely as a separate project)
• A lot of debugging (though we don't know of any bugs, they are there)
• Building out of features we didn't need for the initial go (for example, support for %union, etc).

And a lot more., _(*19)

Contributing