From: Wil <iamwil@...>
Date: 2006-11-12T00:55:04+09:00
Subject: Ruby parsing in Ruby

Hi all,

I've been doing Ruby for a small while now, but I'm a newbie when it
comes to parsing.  I've been digging around, but still can't seem to
find the answer.  I was wondering if Ruby itself has classes that I can
use to parse ruby source code into a parse tree.

My first inclination was to use Racc
(http://i.loveruby.net/en/projects/racc/), but I didn't want to have to
write the BNF(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus-Naur_form) for Ruby if I
didn't have to (maybe it's not that hard?).  I wasn't able to find a
library of BNF for different languages (including Ruby), so then I
started looking elsewhere.

Both irb and ri probably use a Ruby parser of some sort, but looking at
the source code, it looked like each of them rolled their own.  I
wasn't able to dig out the ruby parsing functionality from either by
including what I thought were necessary code modules.

What would be the easiest way to parse Ruby source into parse trees in
Ruby?  Thanks!

Wil