Sunday, April 30, 2006

Rubyfront 0.2.0 released

This new version of Rubyfront fixed a bug found when parsing Ruby on Rails 1.1.2. You can download the source code from here.

In rubyfront 0.2.0, I changed the way it handles expression substitution. The older versions of rubyfront ignores the content in expression substitution. For example, if the input is:

"hello, #{name}"

The lexer will first start to scan the input as a double quote string. After it sees "#{", it will go find the first '}' and think that is the end of the expression substitution. Unfortunately, expression substitution may contain '}' itself. For example:

"begin #{1.times {"block"}} end"


The lexer can not match the above input as one string. Expression substitution can contain any legal ruby program (compoundStatement), and only the parser understands the structure.

To correctly handle this situation, the new lexer will suspend its state when the start of expression substitution is seen (only 'begin ' is matched so far). After the parser finishes its processing of expression substitution, it will notify the lexer and the lexer will resume its state and matches the rest of the string (' end').

Btw, when you run parser smoke test against Ruby on Rails 1.1.2, you will see the following failures:

C:\Documents and Settings\xxx\workspace\rubyfront>build parsersmoketest
<...>
parsersmoketest:
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\activerecord-1.14.2\test\connections\native_sqlite3\in_memory_connection.rb: line 18:76: expecting EOF, found ')'
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\environments\environment.rb: line 8:1: unexpected token: <
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\lib\rails_generator\generators\components\controller\templates\controller.rb: line 1:7: unexpected token: <
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\lib\rails_generator\generators\components\controller\templates\functional_test.rb: line 1:41: unexpected token: ..
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\lib\rails_generator\generators\components\controller\templates\helper.rb: line 1:8: unexpected token: <
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\lib\rails_generator\generators\components\integration_test\templates\integration_test.rb: line 3:7: unexpected token: <
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\lib\rails_generator\generators\components\mailer\templates\mailer.rb: line 1:7: unexpected token: <
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\lib\rails_generator\generators\components\mailer\templates\unit_test.rb: line 4:7: unexpected token: <
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\lib\rails_generator\generators\components\migration\templates\migration.rb: line 1:7: unexpected token: <
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\lib\rails_generator\generators\components\model\templates\migration.rb: line 1:7: unexpected token: <
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\lib\rails_generator\generators\components\model\templates\model.rb: line 1:7: unexpected token: <
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\lib\rails_generator\generators\components\model\templates\unit_test.rb: line 1:41: unexpected token: ..
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\lib\rails_generator\generators\components\plugin\templates\generator.rb: line 1:7: unexpected token: <
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\lib\rails_generator\generators\components\plugin\templates\unit_test.rb: line 3:7: unexpected token: <
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\lib\rails_generator\generators\components\scaffold\templates\controller.rb: line 1:7: unexpected token: <
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\lib\rails_generator\generators\components\scaffold\templates\functional_test.rb: line 5:7: unexpected token: <
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\lib\rails_generator\generators\components\scaffold\templates\helper.rb: line 1:8: unexpected token: <
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\lib\rails_generator\generators\components\session_migration\templates\migration.rb: line 1:7: unexpected token: <
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\lib\rails_generator\generators\components\web_service\templates\api_definition.rb: line 1:7: unexpected token: <
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\lib\rails_generator\generators\components\web_service\templates\controller.rb: line 1:7: unexpected token: <
[java] parser exception for C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\rails-1.1.2\lib\rails_generator\generators\components\web_service\templates\functional_test.rb: line 1:41: unexpected token: ..
[java] 2428 ruby programs have been parsed, 21 failed.


Those errors are expected as those files are in .rhtml format (not valid ruby, ROR requires erb to preprocess them).

1 Comments:

Blogger Tom Copeland said...

Hi Xue -
This is great stuff; I've been working on a JavaCC grammar for Ruby and am running into some of the same sorts of issues. It was interesting to read that HERE docs require a symbol table... whew, that's a big reach up all the way from the lexer to the symbol table! Anyhow, keep up the good work.
Yours,
Tom

2:59 PM  

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