What is this?¶
Pegen is the parser generator used in CPython to produce the parser used by the interpreter. It allows to produce PEG parsers from a description of a formal Grammar.
Installing¶
Install with pip or your favorite PyPi package manager.
pip install pegen
How to generate a parser¶
Given a grammar file compatible with pegen (you can write your own
or start with one in the data directory), you can easily
generate a parser by running:
python -m pegen <path-to-grammar-file> -o parser.py
This will generate a file called parser.py in the current directory.
This can be used to parse code using the grammar that we just used:
python parser.py <file-with-code-to-parse>
Differences with CPython’s Pegen¶
This repository exists to distribute a version of the Python PEG parser generator used by CPython that can be installed via PyPI, with some improvements. Although the official PEG generator included in CPython can generate both Python and C code, this distribution of the generator only allows to generate Python code. This is due to the fact that the C code generated by the generator included in CPython includes a lot of implementation details and private headers that are not available for general usage.
The official PEG generator for Python 3.9 and later is now included in the CPython repo under Tools/peg_generator/.
See also PEP 617.
Indices and tables¶
Developing¶
We welcome contributions to pegen. Check
CONTRIBUTING.md
to get an idea of how to contribute to the project.