TechieVarta with C++ Guru

Note that this post applies to Spirit.Classic or 2.0.

I recently had write a parser in C++ and decided to give Boost.Spirit a chance. I was delighted with ease of use of the parser itself. It was a steep learning curve to get started. However, once I got started, it made life significantly simple.

Boost.Spirit provides a very simple way to create a parser using EBNF grammar. Let us consider an e-mail address parser as an example.
+alnum_p >> '@' >> +alnum_p >> *('.' >> +alnum_p);
Simple! Let us understand the above statement. In Boost.Spirit rule<> template defines basic grammar rule. A rule is made up of parsers and other rules. In Boost.Spirit built-in parser all have _p as suffix. The alnum_p parser matches any character or number. ‘+’ represents operator which matches one more more instances of the enclosed parser.

‘>>’ is an overloaded operator which simply says followed by.’@’ is short form of parser which matches character ‘@’.

So the above statement says any alphanumeric string followed by ‘@’ followed by any other alpha numeric string. This can than be followed by any number of “.<alphanumber>”.

By default the >> includes white space skipping. This implies the above parser will match (a@b as well as a @ b).

We don’t want white space skipping for e-mail address. So we need to modify the above rule such that >> does not skip white space. For this and other purposes, the Spirit allows directives. These are special instructions which can be applied to a part of the rule. No white space skipping is achieved by using lexeme_d.
lexeme_d[ +alnum_p >> '@' >> +alnum_p >> *('.' >> +alnum_p);];

I have no clue why the name. But the suffix is _d for all directives.OK! we got a rule. Now let us check if this rule matches a specified string:

bool isEmailAddress(const std::string& str){
return parse(str, lexeme_d[ +alnum_p >> '@' >> +alnum_p >> *('.' >> +alnum_p);], space_p).full;
}

The above statement will check if the supplied string is an e-mail address or not.

In the next post we will discuss how to create more complex examples as well as deal with parse actions.