Syntax guide¶

The basic building blocks¶

You have LITERAL which is any kind of string behind quotes, eg.:

"Hello world!"

You have MACRO which is main backbone of everything.

Using parenthesis, you can pass arguments to macro:

LOAD("path/filename.txt") # Load a text file

if macro doesn't require any, you can simply call it

WORD # Declare, that you'll have any kind of word

Also, macro can have modifier (if it supports it)

WORD+ # Declare, that you'll have 1..N words
WORD* # Declare, that you'll have 0..N words
WORD? # Declare, that you'll have 1 or no words
WORD! # Declare, that you want to ignore this word

More examples

WORD("cat") # Declare, that you'll have exact word `cat`

{"red", "green", "blue"} # Declare array of words

NOTE All of the MACROS are spelled in capital letters

And finally you have VARIABLE. First you must declare it and later you can use just by spelling it's name

CarModels = LOAD("path/models.txt")

# ...

IN_LIST(CarModels) # Check if token is inside of list of car models we provided

If using directly inside macro, array can be writen with simple commas

IN_LIST("audi", "toyota", "bmw", "honda", "nissan", "ford")

For our declarations to make any sense, we need to build an expression. More on that in next topic.

Expressions¶

This language is built on expressions. One expression means:

a) Single rule defining entity

b) Single variable declaration

Rule expression ends with an arrow ->, eg.:

WORD("something") -> MARK("SOMETHING_LABEL")

with MACRO MARK we're assigning a label to rule

Variable declaration expression ends with equals sign =, eg.:

a = "Apple"

When building a rule, you may want to combine several rules into one, you can use array builder for that:

{IN_LIST({"red", "green", "blue", "white", "black", "silver", "brown"}), WORD("car")} -> MARK("CAR_COLOR")

we're saying: If any of these color words are present in text and is followed by word "car", we assume this part can be labeled as "CAR_COLOR"

Logical variants¶

You can say, that your rule expects either word1, or word2. Usually this can be achieved by writing two separate rules, but there's easier way:

{WORD("word1")|WORD("word2")}

Pipe character (|) marks a logical OR meaning that either right or left side can be matched. It works only on surface level, if you want nested logic - write separate rules.