Brief introduction to LPEG Dirk Laurie

About beginner's notes in general

Writing a topic up for oneself is one of the best ways of learning it.

Once you have learnt it, you can never recapture the difficulty you had in understanding the original.

I promise not to re-work these notes to elegance when I know the material well. I will add stuff and correct errors, though. Thanks to members of the Lua list for helping me here, particularly Pierre-Yves Gérardy (alias Pygy).

They are mainly for my own use, especially when I need the information after not having worked with it for a long time. If anyone else finds them helpful, it is a bonus.

They are not intended to be comprehensive, only to flatten the learning curve until the reader knows enough not to be daunted by the official documentation.

Brief introduction to LPEG

LPEG is a library for operating on patterns. It is not an alternative to the Lua string library, but it can be used to implement libraries rather like the string library instead of doing it directly in C.

Some words mean very specific things to LPEG.

string A Lua string, consisting of an arbitrary sequence of bytes. On many systems, one could say "characters" instead. pattern A userdata type, containing enough information to characterize a certain property that a string might have. The properties that can be described are rather like the questions solvers of crossword puzzles tend to ask. For example: "seven letters, starts with 'p', has a double letter in it somewhere". subject A string that is presented for examination to an LPEG function. Its bytes are referred to as "input". match Not the same as string.match . In fact, it may be a good idea to forget everything you know about the Lua string library while coming to grips with LPEG. If a string has the property determined by a pattern, the pattern is said to match the string. I.e. it is the pattern, not the string, that does the matching. The string matched by a pattern, especially when it is only a substring of the subject. The name of an LPEG function that applies a pattern to a subject in an attempt to find a matched substring. E.g lpeg.match(p,"abcdef",2) applies the pattern p at position 2 of "abcdef". The central concept of LPEG. success A pattern succeeds when it matches a substring of the subject at the position where it is applied. Matching the empty string also counts as success, if the pattern allows it. failure A pattern fails when it does not match any substring at that position, not even the empty string. capture Not just a portion of a match. One of the individually accessible Lua values returned by some patterns. To return such a value. A capture pattern. capture pattern A pattern designed to return one or more captures when it succeeds. consume A pattern consumes its match if that portion of the subject is not available to any follow-up pattern except a backspace pattern.

The most spectacular feature of LPEG is the way complicated patterns are built up from simpler ones: Patterns can be used instead of numbers as the values that the variables in an arithmetic expression may take. For example, x^2+3*x-13 is a perfectly valid LPEG expression when x is a pattern.

Roberto Ierusalimschy put a lot of thought into allocating useful meanings to the arithmetic operations and constants of Lua. In particular, the priority of operations is such that one often needs no parentheses. Some words of warning, though:

To make a pattern actually do anything, it must be passed to the function match .

Constants like 3 or true in a pattern expression are special shorthand notations. They are recognized as patterns only when a pattern is expected, e.g. as an argument to match or another LPEG function, or when combined with existing patterns. To combine two constants, first convert at least one of them to a pattern by lpeg.P (the lpeg. is used only here, it will be just P later). I.e. if Lua will think 3 is just a number, say P(3) instead of just 3 .

The expressions look familiar but that must not mislead you into thinking that the usual commutative, associative and distributive laws of algebra hold. They don't.

Nil is not a valid pattern. This goes without saying, but I am nevertheless saying it. Booleans denote success or failure. true stands for a pattern that always succeeds, false for a pattern that always fails. Strings correspond to themselves. A string stands for a pattern that matches only that exact string. Integers correspond to string length. 0 stands for a pattern that matches the empty string, positive n for a pattern that matches exactly n bytes, -n for the negation of n (see next item). Negation means reversal of fortune. -p succeeds when p fails. It consumes no input. -n succeeds when there are fewer than n bytes of input left. Functions mean user-defined patterns. A function fct stands for a pattern that fails when fct returns a Lua false value (i.e. false , nil or none) and succeeds when it returns true or a new valid position. See Cmt under Captures for a specification of fct . Tables mean composite patterns. A table stands for a grammar, i.e. a pattern based on a collection of local patterns that are allowed to refer to each other recursively. See Grammars. Length means don't consume. #p matches what p matches, but consumes no input. Multiplication corresponds to concatenation. Suppose p and q respectively match a and b , then p*q matches a..b . Note that multiplication is not commutative. Addition corresponds to shortcut or . p+q matches what p matches, except when p fails; then it matches what q matches. Note that p+q succeeds if and only if q+p succeeds, but if both p and q would succeed, the match is that of the first pattern. So addition is not quite commutative. Subtraction corresponds to reverse shortcut and not . p-q fails if q succeeds, otherwise matches what p matches. Note that 0-p does the same as -p , but p-p does not do the same as 0 , it does the same as false . Division means make or process captures. p/s matches what p does, and defines a capture for the whole expression by processing the captures of p as specified by s . It can also turn a non-capture pattern into a capture pattern. Here are the simplest cases, assuming that p is a non-capture pattern that has matched the non-nil value named value . number: p/1 captures value .

captures . table: p/tbl captures tbl[value] if it is not nil.

captures if it is not nil. string: p/str captures str:gsub("%0",value) .

captures . function: p/fct captures fct(value) , even if the return value is nil. Returning nothing means no capture, which is not the same thing. For the fallbacks when value or tbl[value] is nil or fct(value) returns nothing, and for what happens when p is already a capture pattern, see Captures. Exponentiation corresponds to repetition. Not quite exponentiation in the usual sense: p*p means exactly two repetitions of p , which is not the same as p^2 . p^n matches n or more repetitions of p .

matches or more repetitions of . p^0 matches any number of repetitions of p .

matches any number of repetitions of . p^-n matches not more than n repetitions of p . If there are more, p^-n still succeeds; the other repetitions are still there for follow-up patterns to examine. p^0 and p^-n match the empty string, but p itself is restricted to patterns that do not match the empty string.

For example, suppose x=P"abc" . Then x^2+3*x-13 means "two or more copies of abc , or any three bytes followed by abc , but shorter than 13 bytes".

Some LPEG functions

The introductory lpeg. has been omitted here. I have set up my system so that typing lpeg in a command shell does

lua -l lpeg -e "for k,v in pairs(lpeg) do _ENV[k]=v end" -i

Then I treat these names as reserved:

B C Carg Cb Cc Cf Cg Cmt Cp Cs Ct P R S V

More items than those get copied, but I don't bother about the others. Actually I just remember "avoid one-letter uppercase and short names starting with C ".

Pattern constructors

P (Pattern) P(v) converts to a pattern a value v of any Lua type except thread or non-pattern userdata, as described above. Existing patterns are returned unchanged. It is not advisable for v to have a metatable. P is explicitly needed at least once when forming a new pattern from scratch, but seldom after that; the LPEG functions invoke P automatically when expecting a pattern. R (Range) R(r) , where r is a two-byte string, matches any byte whose internal numerical code is in the range r:byte(1,2) . You could use characters in r , e.g. R"az" on most systems matches the range of lowercase letters (but see locale for a more portable alternative). S (Set) S(s) , where s is a string, matches any of the bytes in s . locale locale() returns a table of patterns that match character classes. Recommended method is to examine the keys of the returned table, e.g. locale().lower matches all lower-case letters.

Pattern methods

When called with p as first argument, these functions will replace p by P(p) before proceeding. When p is already a pattern, they can also be called in an object-oriented way, as occasionally shown below.

match(p,subject[,init]), p:match(subject,init, ...) Tries to match p to subject:sub(init) . init defaults to 1. Returns the captures of the match, or if none specified, the next position, i.e. the index of the first byte in the subject after the match. Returns nil only when the capture fails. As indicated, you may not omit the init argument to match when there are extra arguments. Those optional arguments can be accessed as described under Captures. B(p), p:B() (Backspace) Matches what p does, but matches just before the next position instead of at it and consumes no input. p is restricted to patterns of fixed length that make no captures. C(p), p:C() (Capture) Matches what p does, and returns a capture of the match, plus all captures that were made.

Advanced topics

The LPEG distribution contains re.lua , an application demonstrating the feasibility of writing a regular expression handler using LPEG. The present author is not yet qualified to write about that. He is probably not qualified to write about the topics below either, but he pretends to be.

Captures

Captures made by a subexpression automatically become captures of the whole expression, and are eventually returned by match , unless modified by the division operator and the capture methods.

The patterns made by P acting on a non-pattern do not capture anything. They can be made to do so with the four options provided by the division operator. In principle one can do almost anything that way, since one of the options is to process the match by a function of one's own choosing.

In practice some tasks are so common that it is useful to have additional capture functions predefined. We are reaching the limits of this primer here, and there is really no substitute for reading the official LPEG documentation, or at least the tutorial on the LuaWiki, but at the risk of saying too much but not enough, here are some of them.

The pattern p1=P'a'/"A"+P'b'/"B"+P'c'/"C" , which matches lower-case a , b or c and captures the upper-case equivalent, is used in some of the examples.

All the capture constructors are pattern modifiers: they affect what happens after a given pattern succeeds. For all except Cmt , success or failure is determined by the pattern, and the capture constructor merely determines which captures will be produced. As in table constructors, return lists etc, nil captures are significant as placeholders.

Carg(n) Captures the n -th extra argument to match . (p1*Carg(1)*p1):match("ab",1,2) returns 'A',2,'B' (the 1 is init , which is non-optional if you want to use extra arguments). Cp() (Position) Captures the next position, i.e. n+1 when the input up to position n has been consumed. (p1*p1*Cp()):match("ab") returns 'A','B',3 . Cc(...) (Constant) Captures all its arguments. (p1+Cc(math.pi)):match"xyz" returns 3.1415926535898 . Ct(p), p:Ct() (Table) Captures a table containing all the captures of p . Ct(p1*Carg(1)*p1):match("ab",1,2) is {A,2,B} . Cs(p), p:Cs() (Substitute in String) Substitute the matched substring in the full match by its captured value. Cs(p1*Carg(1)*p1):match("ab",1,2) returns A2B . The captures must be strings. Note that the substitution applies to the match, not to the full subject: Cs(p1*Carg(1)*p1):match("abc",1,2) also returns A2B . Cf(p,fct), p:Cf(fct) (Fold by Function) fct must be a function of two variables. Think of it as a left-associative binary operator applied between the captures of p . The result is the capture of Cf(p,fct) . (C(1)^3):match"361" returns '3','6','1' but Cf(C(1)^3,math.max):match"361" returns 6 . Cmt(p,fct) (Match-Time iMmediaTe) Makes a new match immediately after p reports success. This does more than define captures for p , it overrules everything that p did: whether the match fails despite the success of p , and in the case of success, what the new position after the match is, and what captures the modified pattern returns. The call to fct supplies arguments subj,pos,... , where the pos is the next position after the match of p and the vararg list contains all the captures that p made. The first return value must be one of: false , nil or none if the match fails;

, or none if the match fails; true , if the match succeeds but consumes no input;

, if the match succeeds but consumes no input; the new position, which must be in the range pos to #subj+1 . In the case of success, further return values of fct become captures of Cmt(p,fct) . This specification of function fct is also applicable when P(fct) is used to create a user-defined pattern.

Finally we are in a position to use LPEG to test for the property mentioned when we defined "pattern": "seven letters, starts with 'p', has a double letter in it somewhere".

dbl = function(s,p) while p<#s do if s:sub(p,p)==s:sub(p+1,p+1) then return p+1 end p=p+1 end end pat = #P(dbl)*#P"p"*P(7)

Group and back captures

These patterns are useless by themselves. They are always used as part of a bigger pattern.

The first version of this document said: "The remaining capture functions: Cg and Cb , are definitely too advanced for this primer." That is still basically true, but one application is within reach: the Group-Back combination allows values to be stored and retrieved.

Cg(p,name), p:Cg(name) (Group) Collects all the captures p made into a single entity, and gives that entity a name for future reference. Does not actually add any captured values to the big pattern. Cb(name) (Back) Retrieves the entity with the given name, and supplies its captures to the big pattern.

Here is how it works.

name = C(R"AZ"*R"az"^1) -- Capitalized word entry = Cg(name,'surname')*','*P" "^0*name*Cb'surname' -- reverses the items in a two-item comma-separated list like `data` data = "Ierusalimschy, Roberto" result = {entry:match(data)} print (table.concat(result,' ')) --> Roberto Ierusalimschy

There's also an anonymous version of Cg , with the name omitted. For that, and much more, take a look at Pygy's recent addition to http://lua-users.org/wiki/LpegTutorial.

More about the division operator

When p succeeds without producing a capture, p:match returns the next position (see Cp() , above). The division operator cannot negate success: if it discards all captures, the match still succeeds and p/whatever still returns the next position.

If p is a capture pattern but has not actually produced any captures, it acts like a non-capture pattern, as discussed when division was first decribed.

Assume that there is at least one capture, and call the captures c_1 , c_2 etc.

number: p/n captures c_n , p/0 means there is no capture.

captures , means there is no capture. table: p/tbl captures tbl[c_1] except when this is nil, in which case there is no capture.

captures except when this is nil, in which case there is no capture. string: p/str means the capture is the result of replacing in str all instances of "%n" by c_n , where n runs from 0 to 9. c_0 means the whole match. This feature can only handle nine captures.

means the capture is the result of replacing in all instances of by , where runs from 0 to 9. means the whole match. This feature can only handle nine captures. function: p/fct means the capture (or perhaps several captures) is fct(c_1,c_2,...) . Any number of return values are allowed, any or all of which may be nil.

Grammars

A grammar is a pattern constructed out of a table tbl of named patterns, called "rules", that may refer to each other recursively. One of the patterns, known as the "initial rule", becomes the pattern created by P(tbl) ; it must either be tbl[1] or its key must be stored as tbl[1] .

The rules look very much like BNF notation. For example, a simple arithmetic expression might be defined as:

expr ::= term | expr+term | expr-term term ::= factor | term*factor | term/factor

One would like to translate this to LPEG as:

expr = term + expr * '+' * term + expr * '-' * term term = factor + term * '*' * factor + term * '/' * factor

but that would not work, because when the right-hand sides are evaluated, the required values are not known yet. Instead, we put everything inside a table, and use the pattern constructor V (for Variable) to refer to rules.

tbl = { "expr", expr = V"term" + V"term" * "+" * V"expr" + V"term" * "-" * V"expr"; term = factor + factor*"*"*V"term" + factor*"/"*V"term" }

What then happens is quite similar to the distinction between code inside a Lua function definition and outside it. In the following Lua code, the expression x+a is not equivalent to x+1 ; instead, it generates code to be executed later for adding the values that x and a have when the function is executed.

local a = 1 function f(x) return x+a end

Similarly, when V(key) is invoked, the current value of tbl[key] is not relevant: code is generated that will use the future value of tbl[key] at the stage when the table is turned into a pattern. This happens once only: the actual userdata in tbl[key] mutates, after which it is fixed.

For recursive grammars, it is very important that at least one byte of input is consumed before the same rule is applied again, otherwise the pattern goes into an infinite loop. Actually, the first time round, the above definition of tbl did not work because I put the operations in the wrong order: V"expr" * "+" * V"term" instead of V"term" * "+" * V"expr" , etc. (The BNF itself is already wrong, of course.) P(tbl) will in most cases detect such loops and refuse to construct the grammar.

Idioms

Certain subexpressions occur so often in pattern expressions that one gets to recognize them at a glance.

This... matches... -1 the end of the subject. #p*q what q matches, provided that p would succeed. (1-p)^0 everything up to where p would succeed.

1AQ: Once-asked questions

(I can't tell whether they will be frequently asked.)

How do you match anywhere, as the Lua string library does? The easiest way is to use an idiom to skip over the non-matching part: (1-p)^0*Cp()*p*Cp() is a pattern that returns the first position where p succeeds and the position after the match. Can one do a sed -style gsub ? The point of the question is that in earlier versions of Lua, string.gsub and string.gmatch , if given a greedy pattern that can match the empty string, produces an empty match after every nonempty match except right at the end, and in some situations this is not what one wants. Currently Lua no longer does that, but it still is an interesting LPEG question. For example, up to Lua 5.3.2, (string.gsub(";a;","a*","ITEM")) returns "ITEM;ITEMITEM;ITEM" whereas "ITEM;ITEM;ITEM" as returned by the sed command s/a*/ITEM/ or Lua 5.3.3 and later, is more convenient in applications like string splitting. p^0 (where p=P"a" ) acts like the Lua pattern "a*" , but one cannot use it by itself in a loop because it matches the empty string. The trick here is to do the possibly empty first match outside the loop, and let the loop include the non-match in between, which must be non-empty. Let q=p^0/"ITEM" , then matching by Cs(q*((1-p)*q)^0) does the job: the outer Cs substitutes the captures instead of returning them. In general, suppose that the straightforward q=s/r , where s is a non-capture pattern and r the replacement, is not good enough. We need a p so that the pattern Cs(q*((1-p)*q)^0) works instead. The critical property that p must have is to succeed only when the given s produces a non-empty match. You can construct it this way: nonempty=function(str,pos,cap) if cap and #cap>0 then return true end end p=Cmt(s,nonempty) It is not possible to construct p given only q : the information whether the match was empty has been lost.

Case study: an APL-to-Lua compiler

APL is a language in which expressions look something like this:

((⍴X)⍴⍋⍋X⍳X,Y)⍳(⍴Y)⍴⍋⍋X⍳(Y←1 2 3),X←2 3 4

APL has the following properties, simplified slightly for the present purpose.

There are no keywords. Numerous curiously shaped symbols are used to define the language itself. The letters of the alphabet are used only to form names. Everything can be thought of as a function, a value or a name. Functions may be monadic or dyadic (i.e. they take one or two arguments), and return one value. Values can be literal, an evaluated expression or a looked-up name. For some functions, called operators, the arguments as well as the result are functions. One and the same symbol may denote either a monadic or a dyadic function, depending on the presence or absence of a second argument. It may even mean either a function or an operator, depending on the type of that argument. It is known at compile time whether a name refers to a value, a function or an operator, and the syntax depends on that information. Infix notation is used, the first argument of a function (which is always present) being the value of the whole expression to the right, and the second argument (in the case of a dyadic function) being the value to the left of it. Operators are different: the first argument (which is always present) is the function to the left, and the second argument (in the case of a dyadic operator) is the function to the right. Blanks are insignificant, except as separators in a vector of numbers, which is thought of as a single value. Parentheses have their usual meaning. Brackets are used for subscripts as in Lua, but two-index subscripts, separated by a semicolon, are allowed.

It is a substantial but straightforward task to write a Lua library in which the functions do what the APL functions do. For example, ⍳6 in APL means "the integers 1 to 6", and iota(6) could do that; 2 3⍴A means "form a 2×3 matrix out of the contents of A", and rho(A,{2,3}) could do that. Thus 2 3⍴⍳6 which means "form a 2×3 matrix out of the integers 1 to 6" would translate to the Lua expression rho(iota(6),{2,3}) .

The APL expression with which we started, would become

iota(rho(gradeup(gradeup(iota(comma(assign({2,3,4},'X'), assign({1,2,3},'Y')),_V.X))),rho(_V.Y)),rho(gradeup(gradeup( iota(comma(_V.Y,_V.X),_V.X))),rho(_V.X)))

This is getting to be quite daunting. It is quite obvious that such a library will never catch on if Lua users are expected to compose expressions like that for themselves. With the aid of LPEG, a function apl2lua could be written that generates the above Lua code from the original APL code. From there to functions loadapl and doapl is easy, so that the Lua user could write

doapl"(((⍴X)⍴⍋⍋X⍳X,Y)⍳(⍴Y)⍴⍋⍋X⍳(Y←1 2 3),X←2 3 4)"

I'm not saying that is perfectly unobfuscated either, but at least it is no more so than the original APL code is. It's a listed idiom from an APL website, so it's safe to assume that regular APL users would not be fazed by it.

APL syntax is pretty straightforward to express in BNF and that in turn can be expressed directly as a Lua grammar. Add the desired Lua translations via the division operator, and there's our APL compiler.

local apl_expr = P{ "expr"; expr = V'func'*V'expr'/"%1(%2)" + V'leftarg'*V'func'*V'expr'/"%2(%3,%1)" + V"variable"*'←'*V"expr"/"assign(%2,'%1')" + V"leftarg"; func = funcname*operator*funcname/"%2(%1,%3)" + funcname*operator/"%2(%1)" + funcname; leftarg = V"value" + '('*V"expr"*')'/1; value = vector/numbers + V"variable"/"_V.%1"; variable = varname*'['*V"indices"*']'/"%1[%2]" + varname; index = V"expr"+space^0/"nil"; indices = V"index"*';'*V"index"/"{%1;%2}" + V"expr"; }

Wow. Was that easy or was that easy? The only subtlety is that parenthesized expressions in APL need not be parenthesized in Lua, because these expressions will be arguments of a function call.

Actually, that was just the easy part; the rest is harder. We have terminals funcname , operator , vector and varname to supply, plus the function numbers that converts a vector to Lua syntax.

numbers is a list containing decimal numbers separated by whitespace, formatted as in Lua except that minus signs are replaced by APL's high minus, and optional plus signs are not allowed. This can be coded in LPEG as follows, with a little fancy footwork to disallow a lone decimal point.

local space = S"

\t" -- one character of whitespace local dec = R"09"^1 -- positive decimal integer local sign = P"¯"^-1 -- optional high minus local fixed = dec*P"."*dec^-1 + (dec^-1*P".")^-1*dec -- %f number local number = sign*fixed*(S"eE"*sign*dec)^-1 -- %e number local vector = space^0*number*(space^1*number)^0

The numbers function has very little to do, since LPEG has already verified the syntactic correctness of the individual numbers by the time numbers is invoked. We can do it with the Lua string library (no need to be pedantic and do everything in LPEG).

local numbers = function(str) str=str:gsub("¯","-") local v,n = str:gsub("%s+",',') if n==0 then return str else return '{'..v..'}' end end

The remaining terminals are varname , funcname and operator . The legal function and operator names are not known at the stage when the grammar is constructed; the user might add to them at any time. Yet the grammar depends on whether a name refers to a function, an operator or a variable.

Suppose we keep tables for the functions and operators: when the user constructs a new function, it is just an entry added to the table. The key-value pairs will be the APL and Lua representations respectively. A toy version of these tables might be:

local funcs = { ['+']='plus', ['×']='times', ['/']='slash', ['⍋']="gradeup", ['⍴']="rho", ['⍳']="iota", [',']="comma" } local ops = { ['/']='slash', ['.']='dot' }

What we now need is a pattern that captures the value if its key is in a table, and fails when the key is absent. This cannot be done by the division operator, since the pattern has already succeeded by the time /tbl is invoked; only the Cmt constructor can overrule that.

local lookup = function(tbl) return function(subj,pos,key) local v = tbl[key] if v then return pos,v end end end local funcname = Cmt(name,lookup(funcs)) local operator = Cmt(name,lookup(ops))

We have not yet said what qualifies as name . As far as the syntax is concerned, it could be anything that does not match numbers, whitespace or the special characters appearing in the grammar. For reasons of legibility and error detection, that would be too permissive.

Historically, APL allows the usual alphabetic-alphanumeric names plus the names ⍺ and ⍵ , the latter being reserved for argument names in function definitions. In olden days, APL symbols occupied one byte, internally encoded the same way as other symbols like "é": one needed special screen fonts to display them. Nowadays, the APL symbols not in the ASCII character set have their own Unicode characters, usually represented in Lua strings by UTF-8 codepoints, and any decent font can display them.

One must also not lose sight of the fact that APL symbols denote functions, and will be implemented as Lua functions. It is therefore convenient to define any single character that could be an APL function to be an APL name. The following cases cover that:

an alphabetic character followed by any number of alphanumeric characters; any single ASCII character in the byte range 33–126 except those allowed under (a) and the five characters used in the grammar; any two- or three-byte UTF-8 codepoint except high minus and the one character used in the grammar.

Let's code that in LPEG.

local first = R"az"+R"AZ" -- alphabetic local later = first+R"09" -- alphanumeric local utc = R"\x80\xBF" -- UTF-8 continuation byte local utf2 = R"\xC0\xDF"*utc -- 2-byte codepoint local utf3 = R"\xE0\xEF"*utc*utc -- 3-byte codepoint local utf = utf2 + utf3 - P"←"-P"¯" local neutral = R"\x21\x7E"-later-S"()[;]" local name = first*later^0 + utf + neutral

For variable names, we must be more restrictive. The assign operator does not care — assign({2,3,4},'X') — but when variables are referred to, they need to work as unquoted keys — comma(_V.Y,_V.X) . Anything not already defined to be a function or an operator is allowed.

local varname = C(first*later^0-funcname-operator)

Finally, the function that calls match and returns the Lua code. This function would be very short if we took a high-handed attitude to APL syntax errors on the part of the user, but it is quite easy to be helpful.

apl2lua = function(apl) local lua,pos = (apl_expr*Cp()):match(apl) pos = pos or 1 if pos>#apl then return lua else error("APL syntax error

"..apl.."

".. string.rep(' ',utflen(apl:sub(1,pos))-1)..'↑') end end

The Cp() pattern marks how far the APL compiler managed to get. If that is not the end of the APL code, an error message is printed. utflen is a little utility that counts the actual number of codepoints: pos-1 would put in too many spaces since typically lots is two-byte and three-byte codepoints are used in APL code.

Let's test it with the example at the top.

> =apl2lua"((⍴X)⍴⍋⍋X⍳X,Y)⍳(⍴Y)⍴⍋⍋X⍳(Y←1 2 3),X←2 3 4" iota(rho(gradeup(gradeup(iota(comma(assign({2,3,4},'X'), assign({1,2,3},'Y')),_V.X))),rho(_V.Y)),rho(gradeup(gradeup( iota(comma(_V.Y,_V.X),_V.X))),rho(_V.X)))

Exactly what we had before. (Actually, I cheated. My attempt to write this by hand contained several mistakes, so I cut-and-pasted this version to up there.)

And an example with a syntax error (here merely a genuine APL function not included in our toy tables):

> =apl2lua"((⍴X)⍴⍋⍋X⍳X,Y)⍳(⍴Y)⍴?⍋X⍳(Y←1 2 3),X←2 3 4" lpeg-apl-compiler.lua:68: APL syntax error ((⍴X)⍴⍋⍋X⍳X,Y)⍳(⍴Y)⍴?⍋X⍳(Y←1 2 3),X←2 3 4 ↑

The arrow is not quite at the right spot, because the string ending at that point is not legal APL. If the error is inside long parentheses, it is more annoying:

> =apl2lua"((⍴X)⍴?⍋X⍳X,Y)⍳(⍴Y)⍴⍋⍋X⍳(Y←1 2 3),X←2 3 4" lpeg-apl-compiler.lua:68: APL syntax error ((⍴X)⍴?⍋X⍳X,Y)⍳(⍴Y)⍴⍋⍋X⍳(Y←1 2 3),X←2 3 4 ↑

I can explain that, and could maybe make the error detection more intelligent, but is it worth it? Especially since there is a serious error still present:

> return apl2lua"((⍴X)⍴⍋⍋X⍳X,Y)⍳(⍴Y) ⍴⍋⍋ X ⍳ (Y←1 2 3),X←2 3 4" lpeg-apl-compiler.lua:68: APL syntax error ((⍴X)⍴⍋⍋X⍳X,Y)⍳(⍴Y) ⍴⍋⍋ X ⍳ (Y←1 2 3),X←2 3 4 ↑

This is the original, correct expression, with some whitespace added to make it more legible. Our grammar makes no provision for inert whitespace — back to the drawing board!

Postscript: all it took was this:

local funcname = space^0*Cmt(name,lookup(funcs))*space^0 local operator = space^0*Cmt(name,lookup(ops))*space^0 local varname = space^0*C(first*later^0+utf-funcname-operator)*space^0