Using PLY for Parsing Without Using it for Lexing

Over the past week or so I've been struggling with attempting to write my own parser (or parser generator) by hand. A few days ago I finally decided to give up on this notion (after all the parser isn't my end goal) as it was draining my time from the interesting work to be done. However, I wanted to keep my existing lexer. I wrote the lexer by hand in the method I described in a previous post, it's fast, easy to read, and I rather like my handiwork, so I wanted to keep it if possible. I've used PLY before (as I described last year) so I set out to see if it would be possible to use it for parsing without using it for lexing.

As it turns out PLY expects only a very minimal interface from it's lexer. In fact it only needs one method, token(), which returns a new token (or None at the end). Tokens are expected to have just 4 attributes. Having this knowledge I now set out to write a pair of compatibility classes for my existing lexer and token classes, I wanted to do this without altering the lexer/token API so that if and when I finally write my own parser I don't have to remove legacy compatibility stuff. My compatibility classes are very small, just this:

class PLYCompatLexer(object):
    def __init__(self, text):
        self.text = text
        self.token_stream = Lexer(text).parse()

    def token(self):
        try:
            return PLYCompatToken(self.token_stream.next())
        except StopIteration:
            return None


class PLYCompatToken(object):
    def __init__(self, token):
        self.type = token.name
        self.value = token.value
        self.lineno = None
        self.lexpos = None

    def __repr__(self):
        return "<Token: %r %r>" % (self.type, self.value)

This is the entirety of the API that PLY needs. Now I can write my parser exactly as I would normally with PLY.

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