How to parse many characters except few in the parentheses? - parsing

The best way to parse any character except few, is to use noneOf combinator,
Unfortunately it doesn't work if I combine it in the following way:
Combine.parse (Combine.parens <| Combine.many <| Combine.Char.noneOf ['"', '\\']) "()"
Err ((),{ data = "()", input = "", position = 2 },["expected \")\""])
: Result.Result
(Combine.ParseErr ()) (Combine.ParseOk () (List Char))

Your use of noneOf results in that parser consuming all characters including the closing parenthesis. Since the inner portion consumes the closing paren, the Combine.parens parser will not see the closing paren. You need to cause the many <| noneOf ... parser to halt on a closing parenthesis.
Consider adding the closing parenthesis to the list of characters in noneOf:
Combine.parse (Combine.parens <| Combine.many <| Combine.Char.noneOf ['"', '\\', ')']) "()"

Related

Problem while writing a small parser in Haskell using Parsec

I am trying to write a parser for a small language with the following piece of code
import Text.ParserCombinators.Parsec
import Text.Parsec.Token
data Exp = Atom String | Op String Exp
instance Show Exp where
show (Atom x) = x
show (Op f x) = f ++ "(" ++ (show x) ++ ")"
parse_exp :: Parser Exp
parse_exp = (try parse_atom) <|> parse_op
parse_atom :: Parser Exp
parse_atom = do
x <- many1 letter
return (Atom x)
parse_op :: Parser Exp
parse_op = do
x <- many1 letter
char '('
y <- parse_exp
char ')'
return (Op x y)
But when I type in ghci
>>> parse (parse_exp <* eof) "<error>" "s(t)"
I get the output
Left "<error>" (line 1, column 2):
unexpected '('
expecting letter or end of input
If I redefine parse_exp as
parse_exp = (try parse_op) <|> parse_atom
then with I get correct result
>>> parse (parse_exp <* eof) "<error>" "s(t)"
Right s(t)
But I am confused why the first one does not work. Is there a general fix to these kinds of problems in parsing?
When a Parsec parser, like parse_atom, is run on a particular string, there are four possible results:
It succeeds, consuming some input.
It fails, consuming some input.
It succeeds, consuming no input.
It fails, consuming no input.
In the Parsec source code, these are referred to as "consumed ok", "consumed err", "empty ok" and "empty err" (sometimes abbreviated cok, cerr, eok, eerr).
When two Parsec parsers are used in an alternative, like p <|> q, here's how it's parsed. First, Parsec tries to parse with p. Then:
If this results in "consumed ok" or "empty ok", the parse succeeds and this becomes the result of the entire parser p <|> q.
If this results in "empty err", Parsec tries the alternative q, and this becomes the result of the entire p <|> q parser.
If this results in "consumed err", the entire parser p <|> q fails with "consumed err" (cerr).
Note the critical difference between p returning cerr (which causes the whole parser to fail) versus returning eerr (which causes the alternative parser q to be tried).
The try function changes the behavior of a parser by converting a "cerr" result to an "eerr" result.
This means that if you are trying to parse the text "s(t)" with different parsers:
with the parser parse_atom <|> parse_op, the parser parse_atom returns "cok" consuming "s" and leaving unparseable text "(t)" which causes an error
with the parser try parse_atom <|> parse_op, the parser parse_atom still returns "cok" consuming "s", so the try (which only changes cerr to eerr) has no effect, and the unparseable text "(t)" causes the same error
with the parser parse_op <|> parse_atom, the parser parse_op successfully parses the string (actually, it doesn't because the recursive call to parse_exp can't parse "t", but let's ignore that); however, if the same parser was used on the text "s", then parse_op would consume the "s" before failing (i.e., cerr), causing the entire parse to fail instead of trying the alternative parse_atom
with the parser try parse_op <|> parse_atom, this would parse "s(t)", exactly as the previous example, and the try would have no effect; however, it would also work on the text "s", because parse_op would consume the "s" before failing with cerr, then try would "rescue" the parse by turning the cerr into an eerr, and the alternative parse_atom would be checked, successfully parsing (cok) the atom "s".
That's why the "correct" parser for your problem is try parse_op <|> parse_atom.
Be warned that this behavior isn't a fundamental aspect of monadic parsers. It's a design choice made by Parsec (and compatible parsers like Megaparsec). Other monadic parsers can have different rules for how alternatives with <|> work.
The "general fix" for these kind of Parsec parsing problems is to be aware of the facts that in the expression p <|> q:
p is tried first, and if it succeeds, q will be ignored, even if q would provide a "longer" or "better" or "more sensible" parse or avoid additional parsing errors further down the road. In parse_atom <|> parse_op, because parse_atom can succeed on strings meant for parse_op, this order won't work correctly.
q is only tried if p fails without consuming input. You must arrange for p to not consume anything on failure, possibly by using try, if you expect the alternative q to be checked. So, parse_op <|> parse_atom isn't going to work if parse_op starts to consume something (like an identifier) before realizing it can't continue and returning cerr.
As an alternative to using try, you can also think more carefully about the structure of your parser. An alternative way of writing parse_exp, for example, would be:
parse_exp :: Parser Exp
parse_exp = do
-- there's always an identifier
x <- many1 letter
-- there *might* be an expression in parentheses
y <- optionMaybe (parens parse_exp)
case y of
Nothing -> return (Atom x)
Just y' -> return (Op x y')
where parens = between (char '(') (char ')')
This can be written a little more concisely, but even then it's not as "elegant" as something like try parse_op <|> parse_atom. (It performs better, though, so that might be a consideration in some applications.)
The problem is that the string "s" counts as an atom according to your definitions. Try this:
parse parse_atom "" "s(t)"
> Atom "s"
So your parser parse_exp actually succeeds, returning Atom "s", but then you also expect an EOF right after it, and that's where it fails, encountering an open paren instead of an EOF (just like the error message says!)
When you swap the alternative around, it would first attempt parse_op, which would succeed, returning Op "s" "t", and then encounter EOF, just as expected.

FParsec - how to parse strings separated by pipes?

I'm using a FParsec to write a small org-mode parser, for fun, and I'm having a little trouble with parsing a table row into a list of strings. My current code looks like this:
let parseRowEntries :Parser<RowEntries, unit> =
let skipInitialPipe = skipChar '|'
let notaPipe = function
| '|' -> false
| _ -> true
let pipeSep = pchar '|'
skipInitialPipe >>. sepEndBy (many1Satisfy notaPipe) pipeSep
|>> RowEntries
This works fine until you parse the string |blah\n|blah\n|blah| which should fail because of the newline character. Unfortunately simply making \n false in the notaPipe condition causes the parser to stop after the first 'blah' and say it was parsed successfully. What I want the manySatisfy to do is parse (almost) any characters, stopping at the pipe, failing to parse for newlines (and likely the eof character).
I've tried using charsTillString but that also just halts parsing at the first pipe, without an error.
If I've understood your spec correctly, this should work:
let parseOneRow :Parser<_, unit> =
let notaPipe = function
| '|' -> false
| '\n' -> false
| _ -> true
let pipe = pchar '|'
pipe >>. manyTill (many1Satisfy notaPipe .>> pipe) (skipNewline <|> eof)
let parseRowEntries :Parser<_, unit> =
many parseOneRow
run parseRowEntries "|row|with|four|columns|\n|second|row|"
// Success: [["row"; "with"; "four"; "columns"]; ["second"; "row"]]
The structure is that each row starts with a pipe, then the segments within a row are conceptually row|, with|, and so on. The .>> combinator discards the pipe. The reason the "till" part of that line uses skipNewline instead of newline is because the eof parser returns unit, so we need a parser that expects newlines and returns unit. That's the skipNewline parser.
I've tried throwing newlines in where they don't belong (before the pipes, for example) and that causes this parser to fail exactly as it should. It also fails if a column is empty (that is, two pipe characters occur side by side like ||), which I think is also what you want. If you want to allow empty rows, just use manySatisfy instead of many1Satisfy.

Why Parsec's sepBy stops and does not parse all elements?

I am trying to parse some comma separated string which may or may not contain a string with image dimensions. For example "hello world, 300x300, good bye world".
I've written the following little program:
import Text.Parsec
import qualified Text.Parsec.Text as PS
parseTestString :: Text -> [Maybe (Int, Int)]
parseTestString s = case parse dimensStringParser "" s of
Left _ -> [Nothing]
Right dimens -> dimens
dimensStringParser :: PS.Parser [Maybe (Int, Int)]
dimensStringParser = (optionMaybe dimensParser) `sepBy` (char ',')
dimensParser :: PS.Parser (Int, Int)
dimensParser = do
w <- many1 digit
char 'x'
h <- many1 digit
return (read w, read h)
main :: IO ()
main = do
print $ parseTestString "300x300,40x40,5x5"
print $ parseTestString "300x300,hello,5x5,6x6"
According to optionMaybe documentation, it returns Nothing if it can't parse, so I would expect to get this output:
[Just (300,300),Just (40,40),Just (5,5)]
[Just (300,300),Nothing, Just (5,5), Just (6,6)]
but instead I get:
[Just (300,300),Just (40,40),Just (5,5)]
[Just (300,300),Nothing]
I.e. parsing stops after first failure. So I have two questions:
Why does it behave this way?
How do I write a correct parser for this case?
In order to answer this question, it's handy to take a piece of paper, write down the input, and act as a dumb parser.
We start with "300x300,hello,5x5,6x6", our current parser is optionMaybe .... Does our dimensParser correctly parse the dimension? Let's check:
w <- many1 digit -- yes, "300"
char 'x' -- yes, "x"
h <- many1 digit -- yes, "300"
return (read w, read h) -- never fails
We've successfully parsed the first dimension. The next token is ,, so sepBy successfully parses that as well. Next, we try to parse "hello" and fail:
w <- many1 digit -- no. 'h' is not a digit. Stop
Next, sepBy tries to parse ,, but that's not possible, since the next token is a 'h', not a ,. Therefore, sepBy stops.
We haven't parsed all the input, but that's not actually necessary. You would get a proper error message if you've used
parse (dimensStringParser <* eof)
Either way, if you want to discard anything in the list that's not a dimension, you can use
dimensStringParser1 :: Parser (Maybe (Int, Int))
dimensStringParser1 = (Just <$> dimensParser) <|> (skipMany (noneOf ",") >> Nothing)
dimensStringParser = dimensStringParser1 `sepBy` char ','
I'd guess that optionMaybe dimensParser, when fed with input "hello,...", tries dimensParser. That fails, so optionMaybe returns success with Nothing, and consumes no portion of the input.
The last part is the crucial one: after Nothing is returned, the input string to be parsed is still "hello,...".
At that point sepBy tries to parse char ',', which fails. So, it deduces that the list is over, and terminates the output list, without consuming any more input.
If you want to skip other entities, you need a "consuming" parser that returns Nothing instead of optionMaybe. That parser, however, need to know how much to consume: in your case, until the comma.
Perhaps you need some like (untested)
( try (Just <$> dimensParser)
<|> (noneOf "," >> return Nothing))
`sepBy` char ','

Using ParserResult

The example code below appears to work nicely:
open FParsec
let capitalized : Parser<unit,unit> =(asciiUpper >>. many asciiLower >>. eof)
let inverted : Parser<unit,unit> =(asciiLower >>. many asciiUpper >>. eof)
let capsOrInvert =choice [capitalized;inverted]
You can then do:
run capsOrInvert "Dog";;
run capsOrInvert "dOG";;
and get a success or:
run capsOrInvert "dog";;
and get a failure.
Now that I have a ParserResult, how do I do things with it? For example, print the string backwards?
There are several notable issues with your code.
First off, as noticed in #scrwtp's answer, your parser returns unit. Here's why: operator (>>.) returns only the result returned by the right inner parser. On the other hand, (.>>) would return the result of a left parser, while (.>>.) would return a tuple of both left and right ones.
So, parser1 >>. parser2 >>. eof is essentially (parser1 >>. parser2) >>. eof.
The code in parens completely ignores the result of parser1, and the second (>>.) then ignores the entire result of the parser in parens. Finally, eof returns unit, and this value is being returned.
You may need some meaningful data returned instead, e.g. the parsed string. The easiest way is:
let capitalized = (asciiUpper .>>. many asciiLower .>> eof)
Mind the operators.
The code for inverted can be done in a similar manner.
This parser would be of type Parser<(char * char list), unit>, a tuple of first character and all the remaining ones, so you may need to merge them back. There are several ways to do that, here's one:
let mymerge (c1: char, cs: char list) = c1 :: cs // a simple cons
let pCapitalized = capitalized >>= mymerge
The beauty of this code is that your mymerge is a normal function, working with normal char's, it knows nothing about parsers or so. It just works with the data, and (>>=) operator does the rest.
Note, pCapitalized is also a parser, but it returns a single char list.
Nothing stops you from applying further transitions. As you mentioned printing the string backwards:
let pCapitalizedAndReversed =
capitalized
>>= mymerge
>>= List.rev
I have written the code in this way for purpose. In different lines you see a gradual transition of your domain data, still within the paradigm of Parser. This is an important consideration, because any subsequent transition may "decide" that the data is bad for some reason and raise a parsing exception, for example. Or, alternatively, it may be merged with other parser.
As soon as your domain data (a parsed-out word) is complete, you extract the result as mentioned in another answer.
A minor note. choice is superfluous for only two parsers. Use (<|>) instead. From experience, careful choosing parser combinators is important because a wrong choice deep inside your core parser logic can easily make your parsers dramatically slow.
See FParsec Primitives for further details.
ParserResult is a discriminated union. You simply match the Success and Failure cases.
let r = run capsOrInvert "Dog"
match r with
| Success(result, _, _) -> printfn "Success: %A" result
| Failure(errorMsg, _, _) -> printfn "Failure: %s" errorMsg
But this is probably not what you find tricky about your situation.
The thing about your Parser<unit, unit> type is that the parsed value is of type unit (the first type argument to Parser). What this means is that this parser doesn't really produce any sensible output for you to use - it can only tell you whether it can parse a string (in which case you get back a Success ((), _, _) - carrying the single value of type unit) or not.
What do you expect to get out of this parser?
Edit: This sounds close to what you want, or at least you should be able to pick up some pointers from it. capitalized accepts capitalized strings, inverted accepts capitalized strings that have been reversed and reverses them as part of the parser logic.
let reverse (s: string) =
System.String(Array.rev (Array.ofSeq s))
let capitalized : Parser<string,unit> =
(asciiUpper .>>. manyChars asciiLower)
|>> fun (upper, lower) -> string upper + lower
let inverted : Parser<string,unit> =
(manyChars asciiLower .>>. asciiUpper)
|>> fun (lower, upper) -> reverse (lower + string upper)
let capsOrInvert = choice [capitalized;inverted]
run capsOrInvert "Dog"
run capsOrInvert "doG"
run capsOrInvert "dog"

Grouping lines with Parsec

I have a line-based text format I want to parse with Parsec†. A line either starts with a pound sign and specifies a key value pair separated by a colon or is a URL that is described by the previous tags.
Here's a short example:
#foo:bar
#faz:baz
https://example.com
#foo:beep
https://example.net
For simplicity's sake, I'm going to store everything as String. A Tag is a type Tag = (String, String), for example ("foo", "bar"). Ultimately, I'd like to group these as ([Tag], URL).
However, I struggle figuring out how to parse either [one or more tags] or [one URL].
My current approach looks like this:
import qualified System.Environment as Env
import qualified Text.Megaparsec as M
import qualified Text.Megaparsec.Text as M
type Tag = (String, String)
data Segment = Tags [Tag] | URL String
deriving (Eq, Show)
tagP :: M.Parser Tag
tagP = M.char '#' *> ((,) <$> M.someTill M.printChar (M.char ':') <*> M.someTill M.printChar M.eol) M.<?> "Tag starting with #"
urlP :: M.Parser String
urlP = M.someTill M.printChar M.eol M.<?> "Some URL"
parser :: M.Parser Segment
parser = (Tags <$> M.many tagP) M.<|> (URL <$> urlP)
main :: IO ()
main = do
fname <- head <$> Env.getArgs
res <- M.parseFromFile (parser <* M.eof) fname
print res
If I try to run this on the above sample, I get a parsing error like this:
3:1:
unexpected 'h'
expecting Tag starting with # or end of input
Clearly my use of many in combination with <|> is incorrect. Since the tag parser won't consume any input from the URL parser it cannot be related to backtracking. How do I need to change this to get to the desired result?
The full example is available on GitHub.
† I'm actually using MegaParsec here for better error messages but I think the problem is quite generic and not about any particular implementation of parser combinators.
What you're doing works quite fine, only, at the moment you only parse a single segment (i.e., either only tags or only a URL), but that doesn't consume the whole input. It's eof that's causing the error.
Simply use one more many or some, to allow for multiple segments:
main :: IO ()
main = do
fname <- head <$> Env.getArgs
res <- M.parseFromFile (many parser <* M.eof) fname
print res
#cocreature answered this for me on Twitter.
As leftaroundabout pointed out here, there are two separate mistakes in my code:
The parser itself misuses <|> while it should just sequentially parse the lines and skip to the next parser if it doesn't consume any input.
The invocation (parseFromFile) only applies the parser function a single time and would fail as soon as it would get to the second block.
We can fix the parser and introduce grouping in one go:
parser :: M.Parser ([Tag], String)
parser = liftA2 (,) (M.many tagP) urlP
Afterwards, we just need to apply the change suggested by leftaroundabout:
...
res <- M.parseFromFile (M.many parser <* M.eof) fname
Running this leads to the desired result:
[([("foo","bar"),("faz","baz")],"https://example.com"),([("foo","beep")],"https://example.net")]

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