Lex and Yacc in PHP [closed]

Question

Is there an implementation of Lex and Yacc in PHP?

If not, can anyone suggest a lexical analyser and parser generator (ie, anything like Lex and Yacc) that will create PHP code. I'm not too worried about the performance of the resulting parser.

I am sick of using regex to parse things that really shouldn't be parsed with regex...

Answer 1

There's JLexPHP: https://github.com/wez/JLexPHP/blob/master/jlex.php

I've not used it, but there's this: http://pear.php.net/package/PHP_ParserGenerator , which creates a PHP Parser from a Lemon grammar. The project seems to be inactive though.

I also found this project: http://code.google.com/p/antlrphpruntime/ , which uses Antlr. Again inactive though.

Answer 2

Been for looking for this kind of thing for a while. After finding this post, I've tried the ANTLR PHP runtime. I can report that it's far from being finished. There are several errors in the generated code, where the original java runtime classes has not been properly translated to PHP (nested class declarations, using '.' instead of '.' when trying to access class methods operator).

The ANTLR framework itself is quite powerful (can't attest to the efficiency of the generated code). Especially the graphical tool ANTLRWorks makes it easy to create and debug grammas. Just too bad about the PHP version. It's possible to roll your own though. The best solution may be to analyse the generated ANTLR runtime class, figure out how it's works, and come up with a light weight less enterprisey version thereof.

Answer 3

Cheap trick: code a recursive descent parser. This will cover a lot of cases. See Is there an alternative for flex/bison that is usable on 8-bit embedded systems?