gordonsmith/chevrotain

Parser Building Toolkit for JavaScript

Chevrotain

Introduction

Chevrotain is a blazing fast and feature rich Parser Building Toolkit for JavaScript. It can be used to build parsers/compilers/interpreters for various use cases ranging from simple configuration files, to full fledged programing languages.

A more in depth description of Chevrotain can be found in this great article on: Parsing in JavaScript: Tools and Libraries.

It is important to note that Chevrotain is NOT a parser generator. It solves the same kind of problems as a parser generator, just without any code generation. Chevrotain Grammars are pure code which can be created/debugged/edited as any other pure code without requiring any new tools or processes.

TLDR

• Online Playground
• Getting Started Tutorial
• Performance benchmark

Installation

• npm: npm install chevrotain
• Browser: The npm package contains Chevrotain as concatenated and minified files ready for use in a browser. These can also be accessed directly via UNPKG in a script tag.
  • Latest:
    • https://unpkg.com/chevrotain/lib/chevrotain.js
    • https://unpkg.com/chevrotain/lib/chevrotain.min.js
  • Explicit version number:
    • https://unpkg.com/[email protected]/lib/chevrotain.js
    • https://unpkg.com/[email protected]/lib/chevrotain.min.js

Documentation & Resources

• Getting Started Tutorial.

• Sample Grammars.

• FAQ.

• Other Examples.

• HTML API docs.

  • The Parsing DSL Docs.

Dependencies

There is a single dependency to regexp-to-ast library. This dependency is included in the bundled artifacts, for ease of consumption in browsers.

Compatibility

Chevrotain runs on any modern JavaScript ES5.1 runtime. That includes any modern nodejs version, modern browsers and even IE11.

• Uses UMD to work with common module loaders (browser global / amd / commonjs).

Contributions

Contributions are greatly appreciated. See CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

Where used

Some interesting samples:

• Prettier Java Plugin Parser
• JHipster Domain Language
• Metabase BI expression Parser.
• Three.js VRML Parser
• Argdown Parser
• Stardog Union Parsers (GraphQL/SPARQL/and more...)
• Bombadil Toml Parser
• Eve Interactive Programing Language Parser.
• BioModelAnalyzer's ChatBot Parser.