TL;DR

An example is worth a thousands explanations.

In recent post Trying Marpa, I described how I decided to jump on the shoulders of Giants to address the 19th day of Advent of Code.

That allowed me to overcome one of the drawbacks of having a small, low-level library of functions for building parsers:

So far, this has prevented me doing two things:

• learn more on what regular expressions have become in later years, and
• learn something about Marpa (well… release 2 at least).

After solving that day’s challenge, I went through the 19th day specific thread on Reddit and noticed a little, great gift by __Abigail__ (yes, that Abigail):

/(?(DEFINE)
    (?<RULE_0>(?: (?&RULE_4) (?&RULE_1) (?&RULE_5)))
    (?<RULE_1>(?: (?&RULE_2) (?&RULE_3) )|(?: (?&RULE_3) (?&RULE_2)))
    (?<RULE_2>(?: (?&RULE_4) (?&RULE_4) )|(?: (?&RULE_5) (?&RULE_5)))
    (?<RULE_3>(?: (?&RULE_4) (?&RULE_5) )|(?: (?&RULE_5) (?&RULE_4)))
    (?<RULE_4>(?: a))
    (?<RULE_5>(?: b))
)^(?&RULE_0)$/x

So today I decided to unwrap the gift and do a further step to understand modern Perl regular expressions.

Of course the constructs in the little gem above are all explained in the perlre documentation, but being able to relate the code above with a specific grammar is invaluable:

RULE_0: RULE_4 RULE_1 RULE_5
RULE_1: RULE_2 RULE_3 | RULE_3 RULE_2
RULE_2: RULE_4 RULE_4 | RULE_5 RULE_5
RULE_3: RULE_4 RULE_5 | RULE_5 RULE_4
RULE_4: "a"
RULE_5: "b"

So I get this:

• the (?(DEFINE) ... ) block gives us some free space that does no real matching but allows us put all our definitions, great!

• each rule is defined as a named one with the construct (?<NAME_OF_RULE>(? ... )), fine!

• calling another subrule resembles the full formal way of calling Perl functions with construct (?&NAME_OF_RULE), awesome!

After all this DEFINE-ing, it’s match time, so there’s the call to ^(&RULE_0)$ that basically asks to match the whole string against the start rule.

Of course there’s a lot more to learn. In particular, I’m not sure this is the best tool for the job in case we actually want to do something with the captures, like building a AST with some transformations, but it’s still interesting to have a quick example of how to use the recursive features of Perl’s regular expressions engine.

Thanks Abigail 🤩