Math::Expression::Evaluator::Lexer - Simple Lexer

    use Math::Expression::Evaluator::Lexer qw(lex);
    # suppose you want to parse simple math expressions
    my @input_tokens = (
        ['Int',             qr/[+-]?\d+/ ],
        ['Op',              qr{[+-/*]}   ],
        ['Brace_Open',      qr/\(/       ],
        ['Brace_Close',     qr/\)/       ],
        ['Whitespace',      qr/\s+/, sub { return; }],
         );
    my $text = "-12 * (3+4)";
    my $out_tokens = lex($text, \@input_tokens);
    for (@$out_tokens){
        my ($name, $text, $pos) = @$_;
        print "Found Token $name: $text (string pos: $pos)\n";
    }

Math::Expression::Evaluator::Lexer is a simple lexer that breaks up a text into tokens, depending on the input tokens you provide

lex

The only exported routine is lex, which expects input text as its first argument and a array ref to list of input tokens.

Each input token consists of a token name (which you can choose freely), a regex which matches the desired token, and optionally a reference to a functions that takes the matched token text as its argument. The token text is replaced by the return value of that function. If the function returns undef, that token will not be included in the list of output tokens. The regex should either fail or match at least one character; zero-width matches utterly confuse the lexer, and are disallowed.

lex() returns an array ref to a list of output tokens, each output token is a reference to a list which contains the token name, the matched text, the string position (in characters, counted from the start of the input string, zero based) and the line number.

Note that lex() puts parentheses around the entire regex, so if you want to use backreferences, the numbering of the capturing group is changed.

Copyright (C) 2007 by Moritz Lenz, http://moritz.faui2k3.org, moritz@faui2k3.org.

This Program and its Documentation is free software. You may distribute it under the same terms as perl itself.

However all code examples are to be public domain, so you can use it in any way you want to.