| Ragel | |
| Developer: | Adrian Thurston[1] |
| Programming Language: | C++ |
| Genre: | State machine compiler |
| License: | "Ragel 6 remains under GPL v2 [generated code] covered by the MIT (or GPL v2)".[2] Ragel 7: MIT License |
| Latest Release Version: | |
| Latest Preview Version: | 7.0.4 |
| Operating System: | Unix-like, Windows |
Ragel is a finite-state machine compiler and a parser generator. Initially Ragel supported output for C, C++ and Assembly source code,[3] later expanded to support several other languages including Objective-C, D, Go, Ruby, and Java.[4] Additional language support is also in development.[5] It supports the generation of table or control flow driven state machines from regular expressions[6] and/or state charts and can also build lexical analysers via the longest-match method. Ragel specifically targets text parsing and input validation.[7]
Ragel supports the generation of table or control flow driven state machines from regular expressions and/or state charts and can also build lexical analysers via the longest-match method. A unique feature of Ragel is that user actions can be associated with arbitrary state machine transitions using operators that are integrated into the regular expressions. Ragel also supports visualization of the generated machine via graphviz.
The above graph represents a state-machine that takes user input as a series of bytes representing ASCII characters and control codes. 48..57 is equivalent to the regular expression [0-9] (i.e. any digit), so only sequences beginning with a digit can be recognised. If 10 (line feed) is encountered, the program is done. 46 is the decimal point ('.'), 43 and 45 are positive and negative signs ('+', '-') and 69/101 is uppercase/lowercase 'e' (to indicate a number in scientific format). As such, it will recognize the following properly:
2 45 055 78.1 2e5 78.3e12 69.0e-3 3e+3
but not:
.3 46. -5 3.e2 2e5.1
Ragel's input is a regular expression only in the sense that it describes a regular language; it is usually not written in a concise regular expression, but written out into multiple parts like in Extended Backus–Naur form. For example, instead of supporting POSIX character classes in regex syntax, Ragel implements them as built-in production rules. As with usual parser generators, Ragel allows for handling code for productions to be written with the syntax.[8] The code yielding the above example from the official website is:
number = ([0-9]+ $dgt ('.' @dec [0-9]+ $dgt)? ([eE] ([+\-] $exp_sign)? [0-9]+ $exp)?) %number;
main := (number '\n')*;