Ripper

Ripper is a Ruby script parser.

You can get information from the parser with event-based style. Information such as abstract syntax trees or simple lexical analysis of the Ruby program.

Usage

Ripper provides an easy interface for parsing your program into a symbolic expression tree (or S-expression).

Understanding the output of the parser may come as a challenge, it’s recommended you use PP to format the output for legibility.

require 'ripper'
require 'pp'

pp Ripper.sexp('def hello(world) "Hello, #{world}!"; end')
  #=> [:program,
       [[:def,
         [:@ident, "hello", [1, 4]],
         [:paren,
          [:params, [[:@ident, "world", [1, 10]]], nil, nil, nil, nil, nil, nil]],
         [:bodystmt,
          [[:string_literal,
            [:string_content,
             [:@tstring_content, "Hello, ", [1, 18]],
             [:string_embexpr, [[:var_ref, [:@ident, "world", [1, 27]]]]],
             [:@tstring_content, "!", [1, 33]]]]],
          nil,
          nil,
          nil]]]]

You can see in the example above, the expression starts with :program.

From here, a method definition at :def, followed by the method’s identifier :@ident. After the method’s identifier comes the parentheses :paren and the method parameters under :params.

Next is the method body, starting at :bodystmt (stmt meaning statement), which contains the full definition of the method.

In our case, we’re simply returning a String, so next we have the :string_literal expression.

Within our :string_literal you’ll notice two @tstring_content, this is the literal part for Hello, and !. Between the two @tstring_content statements is a :string_embexpr, where embexpr is an embedded expression. Our expression consists of a local variable, or var_ref, with the identifier (@ident) of world.

Resources

• Ruby Inside

Requirements

• ruby 1.9 (support CVS HEAD only)

• bison 1.28 or later (Other yaccs do not work)

License

Ruby License.

                                              Minero Aoki
                                      aamine@loveruby.net
                                    http://i.loveruby.net