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Chapter 22. Boost.Metaparse

Abel Sinkovics

Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)

Table of Contents

Description
Related publications and blogs
Preface
Description
Scope
Advantages of using this library
Cost of using Metaparse
Supported platforms
Getting started with Boost.Metaparse
1. Introduction
2. The text to parse
3. Creating a simple parser
4. Parsing simple expressions
5. Parsing longer expressions
6. Adding support for other operators
7. Dealing with precedence
8. Dealing with associativity
9. Dealing with unary operators
10. Dealing with parens
11. Dealing with invalid input
12. Summary
Copy-paste friendly code examples
Definitions before each section
User manual
What is a parser
Parsing based on constexpr
What types of grammars can be used?
Versioning
Template classes
Macros
Performance
Benchmarks of BOOST_METAPARSE_STRING
Measuring printf
Further measurements
The design of the library
Design rationale
Reference
Parsers and combinators provided by the library
Compile-time data structures and values
String
Errors
Tags
Utilities
Terms used by the library
Alphabetical

Metaparse is a parser generator library for template metaprograms. The purpose of this library is to support the creation of parsers that parse at compile time. This library is intended to be used for embedded domain specific language creation for C++. The input of the generated parser is a compile time string, see string. The result of the parsing process is either an error or any other result the writer of the parser specifies.

The library is similar to Boost.Spirit, however while parsers built with Spirit parse at run-time, parsers built with Metaparse parse at compile-time. Parsers built with Metaparse can output:

  • types
  • constant values
  • objects (types with public static members)
  • callable C++ functions (types with public static method)
  • template metafunction classes

See section What can be built from a compile-time string? for further details.

Based on C++11 features the library can provide advanced utilities for defining the input string, the rest of the library works on C++98-based compilers as well. Note that if you build the tests and examples with Boost.Build using GCC or Clang, the compiler will not have C++11 (or newer) enabled. To build the tests and examples in C++11-mode, you need to run b2 cxxflags="-std=c++11".

An external tutorial can be found at https://github.com/sabel83/metaparse_tutorial#metaparse-tutorial


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