I was wondering whether there is a way in Boost.Spirit.Qi to dynamically combine an arbitrary number of rules at runtime. The inner workings of Boost.Spirit are still a bit of a mystery to me, but since rules are implemented as objects it seems feasible. My motivation is to make certain parts of my grammar easily extendable.
Consider the following contrived example:
namespace qi = boost::spirit::qi;
namespace px = boost::phoenix;
typedef std::string::const_iterator iterator_t;
template<typename Expr>
inline bool parse_full(const std::string& input, const Expr& expr)
{
iterator_t first(input.begin()), last(input.end());
bool result = qi::phrase_parse(first, last, expr, boost::spirit::ascii::space);
return first == input.end() && result;
}
void no_op() {}
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
int attr = -1;
// "Static" version - Works fine!
/*
qi::rule<iterator_t, void(int&)> grammar;
qi::rule<iterator_t, void(int&)> ruleA = qi::char_('a')[qi::_r1 = px::val(0)];
qi::rule<iterator_t, void(int&)> ruleB = qi::char_('b')[qi::_r1 = px::val(1)];
qi::rule<iterator_t, void(int&)> ruleC = qi::char_('c')[qi::_r1 = px::val(2)];
grammar =
ruleA(qi::_r1) | //[no_op]
ruleB(qi::_r1) | //[no_op]
ruleC(qi::_r1); //[no_op]
*/
// "Dynamic" version - Does not compile! :(
std::vector<qi::rule<iterator_t, void(int&)>> rules;
rules.push_back(qi::char_('a')[qi::_r1 = px::val(0)]);
rules.push_back(qi::char_('b')[qi::_r1 = px::val(1)]);
rules.push_back(qi::char_('c')[qi::_r1 = px::val(2)]);
std::vector<qi::rule<iterator_t, void(int&)>>::iterator i(rules.begin()), last(rules.end());
qi::rule<iterator_t, void(int&)> grammar;
grammar = (*i)(qi::_r1);
for(++i; i!=last; ++i)
{
grammar = grammar.copy() | (*i)(qi::_r1);
}
// Tests
if(parse_full("a", grammar(px::ref(attr)))) std::cout << attr << std::endl;
if(parse_full("b", grammar(px::ref(attr)))) std::cout << attr << std::endl;
if(parse_full("c", grammar(px::ref(attr)))) std::cout << attr << std::endl;
std::cin.ignore(std::numeric_limits<std::streamsize>::max(), '\n');
return 0;
}
The error given by Visual Studio 2010 is:
error C2440: 'initializing' : cannot convert from 'boost::fusion::void_' to 'int &'
My suspicion is that this is caused by not passing the inherited attribute to grammar.copy()
. Unfortunately, I couldn't find an easy way of doing this, so I opted for a workaround. As a result, I have one last version (and I would already like to thank anyone who stuck around until now!). This one actually seems to work:
// "Dynamic" version - Kind of works! :-/
std::vector<qi::rule<iterator_t, void(int&)>> rules;
rules.push_back(qi::char_('a')[qi::_r1 = px::val(0)]);
rules.push_back(qi::char_('b')[qi::_r1 = px::val(1)]);
rules.push_back(qi::char_('c')[qi::_r1 = px::val(2)]);
std::vector<qi::rule<iterator_t, void(int&)>>::iterator i(rules.begin()), last(rules.end());
qi::rule<iterator_t, int()> temp;
temp = (*i)(qi::_val); //[no_op]
for(++i; i!=last; ++i)
{
temp = temp.copy() | (*i)(qi::_val); //[no_op]
}
qi::rule<iterator_t, void(int&)> grammar;
grammar = temp[qi::_r1 = qi::_1];
However, once I attach a simple semantic action (such as "[no_op]"), the behavior becomes really weird. Rather than printing 0,1,2 as before, it prints 0,0,2. So I'm wondering, is what I'm trying to accomplish resulting in undefined behavior? Is this a bug? Or quite possibly, am I just using something (e.g. semantic actions?) the wrong way?