Lexer written in Javascript?

Phobis picture Phobis · Dec 1, 2009 · Viewed 20.7k times · Source

I have a project where a user needs to define a set of instructions for a ui that is completely written in javascript. I need to have the ability to parse a string of instructions and then translate them into instructions. Is there any libraries out there for parsing that are 100% javascript? Or a generator that will generate in javascript? Thanks!

Answer

Stobor picture Stobor · Dec 1, 2009

Something like http://jscc.phorward-software.com/, maybe?

JS/CC is the first available parser development system for JavaScript and ECMAScript-derivates. It has been developed, both, with the intention of building a productive compiler development system and with the intention of creating an easy-to-use academic environment for people interested in how parse table generation is done general in bottom-up parsing.

The platform-independent software unions both: A regular expression-based lexical analyzer generator matching individual tokens from the input character stream and a LALR(1) parser generator, computing the parse tables for a given context-free grammar specification and building a stand-alone, working parser. The context-free grammar fed to JS/CC is defined in a Backus-Naur-Form-based meta language, and allows the insertion of individual semantic code to be evaluated on a rule's reduction.

JS/CC itself has been entirely written in ECMAScript so it can be executed in many different ways: as platform-independent, browser-based JavaScript embedded on a Website, as a Windows Script Host Application, as a compiled JScript.NET executable, as a Mozilla/Rhino or Mozilla/Spidermonkey interpreted application, or a V8 shell script on Windows, *nix, Linux and Mac OSX. However, for productive execution, it is recommended to use the command-line versions. These versions are capable of assembling a complete compiler from a JS/CC parser specification, which is then stored to a .js JavaScript source file.