Parsing VHDL with python, where to start.

[Svenn Are Bjerkem]

On Jul 29, 5:14 pm, Wolfgang Grafen <wolfgang.gra... at ericsson.com>
wrote:

> For me it is not very clear what you intend to do. After years of
> parsing parts of VHDL from time to time the rapid parsing way for me is
> using regular expressions instead of one of the parser frame works
> because of following reasons:
>
> - It is hard for me to understand those frameworks
> - They are very slow
> - It is too much work for me to bring them up to work in a sensible way
> - Compared with regular expression matching they usually need a lot of
> extra work.

I agree with frameworks being difficult to understand and that is why
I also have been using regular expressions in tcl to parse spice
netlists before. Now I want to parse spice, vhdl and also maybe
verilog. I think I will end up with regular expressions unless I get a
grip on SimpleParse.

The rationale for the whole project has been to finally be able to
view spice and specially vhdl code for projects I work on. This has
been something I have wanted to have for years, without having the
ressources to complete it. There are commercial tools available, but I
was looking for something more open/free that could be maintained
independently of what tools I have at work.

> PyQt as a widget framework is not useful until here, but of course you
> could display your results in arbitrary graphical ways with PyQt, if you
> rally need to. You should know, printing out an ASCII or XML
> representation is so much more easy and quicker to code so I always
> prefer that. There are even editors/visualizers ready to display XML...

PyQt4 doesn't help me parse my sources, but it helps me visualise
them. I did something in tcl/tk to get hierarchical spice netlists
into a tree structure, but extending that app was too much hassle.
PyQt4 offers a lot of functionality once the threshold of learning it
has been passed. It also installs nicely on windows and most linux
distributions offer it ready to install. And I like Qt.

--
Svenn