MParser, a simple monadic parser combinator library

This library implements a rather complete and efficient monadic parser combinator library similar to the Parsec library for Haskell by Daan Leijen and the FParsec library for FSharp by Stephan Tolksdorf.

See LICENSE.txt for copying conditions (LGPL with static linking exception).

Home page: https://github.com/murmour/mparser.

MParser used to be a part of ocaml-base, a collection of useful OCaml libraries by Holger Arnold¹.

The monadic interface of MParser is compatible with pa_monad².

Dependencies

To build this package, you need:

• OCaml (>= 4.02).
• Dune (>= 1.11)³.
• Findlib⁴.
• Optionally: re⁵ for mparser-re.
• Optionally: pcre-ocaml⁶ for mparser-pcre.

Installing

Either use OPAM⁷ or build manually with Dune⁸.

Installing from OPAM: opam install [sub-library name].

To build manually, cd to this folder and run dune build -p [sub-library name]. Add @install for installation. Add @doc to produce API reference in _build/default/_doc/_html. Consult Dune manual for more options.

Available sub-libraries:

• mparser: base library;
• mparser-re: a plugin that adds support for regular expressions based on re⁹ (MParser_RE module, mparser-re findlib package);
• mparser-pcre: a plugin that adds support for regular expressions based on pcre-ocaml¹⁰ (MParser_PCRE module, mparser-pcre findlib package).

Usage example

Let's implement a simple expression evaluator.

To save the typing effort, it is often handy to open the MParser module:

ocaml

open MParser

First, we define a parsing combinator expr, which handles expression parsing, taking care of the operator precedence issues:

ocaml

let infix p op =

Infix (p |>> (fun _ a b -> (`Binop (op, a, b))), Assoc_left)

let operators =

[

[

infix (char '*') `Mul; infix (char '/') `Div;

]; [ infix (char '+') `Add; infix (char '-') `Sub; ];

]

let decimal =

many1_chars digit |>> int_of_string

let expr =

expression operators (decimal |>> fun i -> `Int i)

Next, we implement an interpreter for our expression tree:

ocaml

let rec calc = function

`Int i -> i
`Binop (op, a, b) -> match op with | `Add -> calc a + calc b | `Sub -> calc a - calc b | `Mul -> calc a * calc b | `Div -> calc a / calc b

The evaluator function:

ocaml

let eval (s: string) : int =

match MParser.parse_string expr s () with

Success e -> calc e
Failed (msg, e) -> failwith msg

Using it:

ocaml

eval "4*4+10/2" -> 21

Have fun!

References

---

1. http://www.holgerarnold.net/software↩

2. https://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~carette/pa_monad↩

3. https://github.com/ocaml/dune↩

4. http://projects.camlcity.org/projects/findlib.html↩

5. https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-re↩

6. https://mmottl.github.io/pcre-ocaml↩

7. https://opam.ocaml.org↩

8. https://github.com/ocaml/dune↩

9. https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-re↩

10. https://mmottl.github.io/pcre-ocaml↩