Lexical analysis with Dissect

There are two classes for lexical analysis in Dissect, both under the namespace Dissect\Lexer: SimpleLexer and StatefulLexer.

SimpleLexer

SimpleLexer simply accepts some token definitions and applies them on the input. Let's create a subclass for this chapter:

use Dissect\Lexer\SimpleLexer;

class ArithLexer extends SimpleLexer
{
    public function __construct()
    {
        // token definitions
    }
}

Defining tokens

There are 3 ways to define a token. The simplest one looks like this:

$this->token('+');

This definition will simply match a plus symbol, using + both as the name and value of the token. You can use 2 arguments:

$this->token('CLASS', 'class');

if you want the token name (first argument) to differ from what will actually be recognized (second argument).

The final way defines a token by a regular expression:

$this->regex('INT', '/^[1-9][0-9]*/');

Let's now define some tokens we will use in the next chapter:

class ArithLexer extends SimpleLexer
{
    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->regex('INT', '/^[1-9][0-9]*/');
        $this->token('(');
        $this->token(')');
        $this->token('+');
        $this->token('*');
        $this->token('**');
    }
}

Tip: You can also chain the method calls using a fluent interface.

Skipping tokens

Some tokens have to be recognized, but we don't want them cluttering the output. The best example are probably whitespace tokens: the lexer has to recognize them, but they carry no meaning or value, so we can tell the lexer to skip them:

class ArithLexer extends SimpleLexer
{
    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->regex('INT', '/[1-9][0-9]*/');
        $this->token('(');
        $this->token(')');
        $this->token('+');
        $this->token('*');
        $this->token('**');

        $this->regex('WSP', "/^[ \r\n\t]+/");
        $this->skip('WSP');
    }
}

You can pass any number of token names to the skip method.

Lexing

Now that we've defined our tokens, we can simply call:

$lexer = new ArithLexer();
$stream = $lexer->lex($input);

The return value is an object implementing the Dissect\Lexer\TokenStream\TokenStream interface. The interface defines several methods you can use to inspect and move through the token stream. See TokenStream.php for all the methods you can use.

If you count the token stream, you may be surprised to find out that for input like 5 + 3, it actually contains 4 tokens. That's because, as the last step of lexing, a special token called $eof is appended to mark the end of input. This is crucial to the parsing process, so please, never define a token called $eof yourself. It could lead to some pretty strange errors. Another forbidden token names are $start and $epsilon.

StatefulLexer

SimpleLexer should work fine for general use cases. However, let's imagine we're lexing a very simple templating language:

Outer content, {{ variable_name }}, other outer content

SimpleLexer falls short here, because the outer content can be pretty much anything, while the content inside the tags has to be strictly intepreted. Furthermore, if we were to work with this template, we'd want to skip the whitespace inside tags, but keep it in the outer content.

That's where StatefulLexer comes in; during lexing, it maintains a stack of states with the top one being the current one, and for each token, you can define the action the lexer should take after recognizing it. Let's see an example for our templating language:

use Dissect\Lexer\StatefulLexer;

class TemplateLexer extends StatefulLexer
{
    public function __construct()
    {
        $lexer->state('outside')
            ->regex('CONTENT', '/^[^"{{"]*/')
            ->token('{{')->action('tag');

        $lexer->state('tag')
            ->regex('WSP', "/^[ \r\n\t]+/")
            ->regex('VAR', '/^[a-zA-Z_]+/')
            ->token('}}')->action(StatefulLexer::POP_STATE)
            ->skip('WSP');

        $lexer->start('outside');
    }
}

Please note that before defining any tokens, we have to define a state. For the tokens that cause the state transition, we call action to specify what should the lexer do. The action can be either a string, in which case the lexer goes to the state specified by the string, or StatefulLexer::POP_STATE, which causes the lexer to pop the current state of the stack, essentialy going back to previous state. Finally, we tell the lexer in which state to start by calling start.

Improving lexer performance

There's one important trick to improve the performance of your lexers. The documentation uses it implicitly, but it requires an explicit mention:

When defining tokens using regular expressions, always anchor the regex at the beginning using ^ like this:

$this->regex('INT', '/^[1-9][0-9]*/');

This little optimization will lead to substantial performance gains on any but the shortest input strings, since without anchoring, the PCRE engine would always look for matches throughout the entire remaining input string, which would be incredibly wasteful for long inputs.

Continue

Now that we've demonstrated how to perform lexical analysis with Dissect, we can move onto syntactical analysis, commonly known as parsing.