Clojurians Log v2

@aengelberg: made some progress this weekend with my instaparse project! https://github.com/adzerk-oss/zerkdown

it's a work in progress of course

it does a braindead parsing of clojure maps/vectors

https://github.com/adzerk-oss/zerkdown/blob/master/src/adzerk/zerkdown/grammar.ebnf

feedback appreciated :simple_smile:

@micha this project is very cool

Does your ebnf allow [{]?

not in a :CLJ or :VEC block

["{"] would be ok though

<VEC-CHAR> = !(LSB | RSB | DQ) ANY-CHAR looks like it would allow mismatched map delimiters inside it

oh interesting

yeah it's ambiguous

!(LSB | RSB | STRING | MAP) ANY-CHAR would be nice there

then it would still allow mismatched quotes and delimiters because strings and maps don't successfully parse :simple_smile:

hmm

maybe (!(LSB | RSB | LCB | RCB | DQ) ANY-CHAR) | STRING | CLJ

yeah

i will try that

i am planning to do the recursion from clojure btw

i will parse one level of indentation, then for each :BLOCK call insta again on the body

it seems like it will be straightforward, i hope

cool

Just make sure instaparse Failures are returned / shortcircuited properly :simple_smile:

how do you mean?

if a "sub-parse" returns a failure, then what?

I imagine it will be most idiomatic to call insta/parse again within the transformer. But my point is, if a parse failure arises (malformed zerkdown) within that, you will need to propagate that error properly :simple_smile:

ah right

what did you mean before about strings and maps not successfully parsing?

negative lookahead = make sure this thing does not successfully parse

!STRING x means no "complete well-formed strings" allowed, but you probably wanted "no double-quotes of any kind really"

and then you can add in | STRING to allow well-formed strings

oh i see

i actually don't care about double quotes

i just don't want well formed strings, because those can legitimately contain {}[] etc

i'm not trying to fully parse the clojure data, i just need to know where it ends

i send it as a string and use clojure.core/read-string on it later

that's fair, but if [{]}] is allowed it's not exactly obvious where it ends :simple_smile:

haha yes

very interesting

anyway I don't think it's super hard to make the delimiters correct. (!(LSB | RSB | LCB | RCB | DQ) ANY-CHAR) | STRING | CLJ

That basically says "no double-quotes, UNLESS there is a well formed string"

yes that's awesome

testing was pretty easy to do, by configuring with different start rules

yeah. just don't forget negative testing :simple_smile:

ah right

yeah i didn't think of that

really cool idea. what is the intended use case for zerkdown?

well i want to use it for just about everything!

mostly for websites

but i can imagine using it for literate programming and things like that

but for making webapps it's really nice to have a "prose" syntax you can customize for your use case

like normally you have like

# My Title

<h1>My Title</h1>

but what if you need something like

<h1>My Title <small>The Best Thing Ever</small></h1>

# My Title <<The Best Thing Ever>>

or even more complex things with behavior and everything, like forms and buttons