Getting Started

Since the PEGTL is a parser library, here is an "inverse hello world" example that parses, rather than prints, the string Hello, foo! for any sequence of alphabetic ASCII characters foo.

// Copyright (c) 2014-2018 Dr. Colin Hirsch and Daniel Frey
// Please see LICENSE for license or visit https://github.com/taocpp/PEGTL/

#include <string>
#include <iostream>

#include <tao/pegtl.hpp>

namespace pegtl = tao::pegtl;

namespace hello
{
   // Parsing rule that matches a literal "Hello, ".

   struct prefix
      : pegtl::string< 'H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', ',', ' ' >
   {};

   // Parsing rule that matches a non-empty sequence of
   // alphabetic ascii-characters with greedy-matching.

   struct name
      : pegtl::plus< pegtl::alpha >
   {};

   // Parsing rule that matches a sequence of the 'prefix'
   // rule, the 'name' rule, a literal "!", and 'eof'
   // (end-of-file/input), and that throws an exception
   // on failure.

   struct grammar
      : pegtl::must< prefix, name, pegtl::one< '!' >, pegtl::eof >
   {};

   // Class template for user-defined actions that does
   // nothing by default.

   template< typename Rule >
   struct action
      : pegtl::nothing< Rule >
   {};

   // Specialisation of the user-defined action to do
   // something when the 'name' rule succeeds; is called
   // with the portion of the input that matched the rule.

   template<>
   struct action< name >
   {
      template< typename Input >
      static void apply( const Input& in, std::string& v )
      {
         v = in.string();
      }
   };

}  // namespace hello

int main( int argc, char* argv[] )
{
   if( argc > 1 ) {
      // Start a parsing run of argv[1] with the string
      // variable 'name' as additional argument to the
      // action; then print what the action put there.

      std::string name;

      pegtl::argv_input<> in( argv, 1 );
      pegtl::parse< hello::grammar, hello::action >( in, name );

      std::cout << "Good bye, " << name << "!" << std::endl;
   }
}

Assuming you are in the main directory of the PEGTL, the above source can be found in the src/example/pegtl/ directory. Compile the program with something like

$ g++ --std=c++11 -Iinclude src/example/pegtl/hello_world.cpp -o hello_world

and then invoke it as follows:

$ ./hello_world 'Hello, world!'
Good bye, world!
$ ./hello_world 'Hello, Colin!'
Good bye, Colin!
$ ./hello_world 'Howdy, Paula!'
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'tao::pegtl::parse_error'
  what():  argv[1]:1:0(0): parse error matching hello::prefix
Aborted (core dumped)

Frequently an application will include a top-level try-catch block to handle the exception.

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Getting Started