Pyparsing help

rh0dium steven.klass at gmail.com
Sun Mar 23 16:48:52 EDT 2008


On Mar 23, 12:26 am, Paul McGuire <pt... at austin.rr.com> wrote:
> There are a couple of bugs in our program so far.
>
> First of all, our grammar isn't parsing the METAL2 entry at all.  We
> should change this line:
>
>     md = mainDict.parseString(test1)
>
> to
>
>     md = (mainDict+stringEnd).parseString(test1)
>
> The parser is reading as far as it can, but then stopping once
> successful parsing is no longer possible.  Since there is at least one
> valid entry matching the OneOrMore expression, then parseString raises
> no errors.  By adding "+stringEnd" to our expression to be parsed, we
> are saying "once parsing is finished, we should be at the end of the
> input string".  By making this change, we now get this parse
> exception:
>
> pyparsing.ParseException: Expected stringEnd (at char 1948), (line:54,
> col:1)
>
> So what is the matter with the METAL2 entries?  After using brute
> force "divide and conquer" (I deleted half of the entries and got a
> successful parse, then restored half of the entries I removed, until I
> added back the entry that caused the parse to fail), I found these
> lines in the input:
>
>     fatTblThreshold                 = (0,0.39,10.005)
>     fatTblParallelLength            = (0,1,0)
>
> Both of these violate the atflist definition, because they contain
> integers, not just floatnums.  So we need to expand the definition of
> aftlist:
>
>     floatnum = Combine(Word(nums) + "." + Word(nums) +
>         Optional('e'+oneOf("+ -")+Word(nums)))
>     floatnum.setParseAction(lambda t:float(t[0]))
>     integer = Word(nums).setParseAction(lambda t:int(t[0]))
>     atflist = Suppress("(") + delimitedList(floatnum|integer) + \
>                 Suppress(")")
>
> Then we need to tackle the issue of adding nesting for those entries
> that have sub-keys.  This is actually kind of tricky for your data
> example, because nesting within Dict expects input data to be nested.
> That is, nesting Dict's is normally done with data that is input like:
>
> main
>   Technology
>   Layer
>     PRBOUNDARY
>     METAL2
>   Tile
>     unit
>
> But your data is structured slightly differently:
>
> main
>   Technology
>   Layer PRBOUNDARY
>   Layer METAL2
>   Tile unit
>
> Because Layer is repeated, the second entry creates a new node named
> "Layer" at the second level, and the first "Layer" entry is lost.  To
> fix this, we need to combine Layer and the layer id into a composite-
> type of key.  I did this by using Group, and adding the Optional alias
> (which I see now is a poor name, "layerId" would be better) as a
> second element of the key:
>
>     mainDict = dictOf(
>         Group(Word(alphas)+Optional(quotedString)),
>         Suppress("{") + attrDict + Suppress("}")
>         )
>
> But now if we parse the input with this mainDict, we see that the keys
> are no longer nice simple strings, but they are 1- or 2-element
> ParseResults objects.  Here is what I get from the command "print
> md.keys()":
>
> [(['Technology'], {}), (['Tile', 'unit'], {}), (['Layer',
> 'PRBOUNDARY'], {}), (['Layer', 'METAL2'], {})]
>
> So to finally clear this up, we need one more parse action, attached
> to the mainDict expression, that rearranges the subdicts using the
> elements in the keys.  The parse action looks like this, and it will
> process the overall parse results for the entire data structure:
>
>     def rearrangeSubDicts(toks):
>         # iterate over all key-value pairs in the dict
>         for key,value in toks.items():
>             # key is of the form ['name'] or ['name', 'name2']
>             # and the value is the attrDict
>
>             # if key has just one element, use it to define
>             # a simple string key
>             if len(key)==1:
>                 toks[key[0]] = value
>             else:
>                 # if the key has two elements, create a
>                 # subnode with the first element
>                 if key[0] not in toks:
>                     toks[key[0]] = ParseResults([])
>
>                 # add an entry for the second key element
>                 toks[key[0]][key[1]] = value
>
>             # now delete the original key that is the form
>             # ['name'] or ['name', 'name2']
>             del toks[key]
>
> It looks a bit messy, but the point is to modify the tokens in place,
> by rearranging the attrdicts to nodes with simple string keys, instead
> of keys nested in structures.
>
> Lastly, we attach the parse action in the usual way:
>
>     mainDict.setParseAction(rearrangeSubDicts)
>
> Now you can access the fields of the different layers as:
>
>     print md.Layer.METAL2.lineStyle
>
> I guess this all looks pretty convoluted.  You might be better off
> just doing your own Group'ing, and then navigating the nested lists to
> build your own dict or other data structure.
>
> -- Paul

Hi Paul,

Before I continue this I must thank you for your help.  You really did
do an outstanding job on this code and it is really straight forward
to use and learn from.  This was a fun weekend task and I really
wanted to use pyparsing to do it.  Because this is one of several type
of files I want to parse.  I (as I'm sure you would agree) think the
rearrangeSubDicts is a bit of a hack but never the less absolutely
required and due to the limitations of the data I am parsing.   Once
again thanks for your great help.  Now the problem..

I attempted to use this code on another testcase.  This testcase had
tabs in it.  I think 1.4.11 is missing the expandtabs attribute.  I
ran my code (which had tabs) and I got this..

AttributeError: 'builtin_function_or_method' object has no attribute
'expandtabs'

Ugh oh.  Is this a pyparsing problem or am I just an idiot..

Thanks again!




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