All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Revised TAP Grammar

Ovid on 2006-09-14T07:26:58

This is my revised TAP grammar. If you're not familiar with reading this style of grammar, here are a few comments:

I'm using POSIX character classes to represent digits and printable characters. If you want to manually encode all of the Unicode characters for [:print:], be my guest :)

The following means "all printable characters except the newline".

([:print:] - "\n")

The following means, a digit followed by zero or more digits.

digit {digit}

A question mark after an atom means it's optional.

I'm not particularly gifted with grammars, so corrections welcome.

The corrected TAP grammar:

digit              ::= [:digit:]
character          ::= ([:print:] - "\n")
positiveInteger    ::= ( digit - '0' ) {digit}
nonNegativeInteger ::= digit {digit}

tap         ::= plan tests | tests plan {comment}
plan        ::= '1..' nonNegativeInteger "\n"
lines       ::= line {lines}
line        ::= (comment | test) "\n"
tests       ::= test {test}
test        ::= status positiveInteger? description? directive?
status      ::= 'not '? 'ok '
description ::= (character - (digit '#')) {character - '#'}
directive   ::= '#' ( 'TODO' | 'SKIP' ) ' ' {character}
comment     ::= '#' {character}

For purposes of forward compatability, all lines which do not match the grammar are labeled as TAPx::Parser::Result::Unknown and are not considered parse errors.

Where is 'lines' used?

htoug on 2006-09-15T07:04:45

A couple of minor points in your grammar:

You define the tokens 'line' and 'lines' but don't use them anywhere.
Also your 'test' does'nt have the terminating "\n", so the entire set of tests are all on one line.

Possibly you should define
      tests ::= lines

and have tests as the starting point of the grammar. That should do it - I think.

Re:Where is 'lines' used?

Ovid on 2006-09-15T08:20:15

Yup. Definitely a bug in the grammar. I'm working on improving it now.