A library for turning unstructured data into structured data, with a focus on composition, performance, generality, and invertibility:
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Composition: Ability to break large, complex parsing problems down into smaller, simpler ones. And the ability to take small, simple parsers and easily combine them into larger, more complex ones.
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Performance: Parsers that have been composed of many smaller parts should perform as well as highly-tuned, hand-written parsers.
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Generality: Ability to parse any kind of input into any kind of output. This allows you to choose which abstraction levels you want to work on based on how much performance you need or how much correctness you want guaranteed. For example, you can write a highly tuned parser on collections of UTF-8 code units, and it will automatically plug into parsers of strings, arrays, unsafe buffer pointers and more.
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Invertibility: Ability to invert your parsers so that they are printers. This allows you to transform your well-structured data back into unstructured data, which is useful for serialization, sending data over the network, URL routing, and more.
This library was designed over the course of many episodes on Point-Free, a video series exploring functional programming and the Swift language, hosted by Brandon Williams and Stephen Celis. You can watch all of the episodes here.
Parsing is a surprisingly ubiquitous problem in programming. We can define parsing as trying to transform unstructured data into structured data. The Swift standard library comes with a number of parsers that we reach for every day. For example, there are initializers on Int, Double, and even Bool, that attempt to parse numbers and booleans from strings:
Int("42") // 42
Int("Hello") // nil
Double("123.45") // 123.45
Double("Goodbye") // nil
Bool("true") // true
Bool("0") // nilAnd there are types like JSONDecoder and PropertyListDecoder that attempt to parse Decodable-conforming types from data:
try JSONDecoder().decode(User.self, from: data)
try PropertyListDecoder().decode(Settings.self, from: data)While parsers are everywhere in Swift, Swift has no holistic story for parsing. Instead, we typically parse data in an ad hoc fashion using a number of unrelated initializers, methods, and other means. And this typically leads to less maintainable, less reusable code.
This library aims to write such a story for parsing in Swift. It introduces a single unit of parsing that can be combined in interesting ways to form large, complex parsers that can tackle the programming problems you need to solve in a maintainable way.
This is an abridged version of the "Getting Started" article in the library's documentation.
Suppose you have a string that holds some user data that you want to parse into an array of Users:
var input = """
1,Blob,true
2,Blob Jr.,false
3,Blob Sr.,true
"""
struct User {
var id: Int
var name: String
var isAdmin: Bool
}A naive approach to this would be a nested use of .split(separator:), and then a little bit of extra work to convert strings into integers and booleans:
let users = input
.split(separator: "\n")
.compactMap { row -> User? in
let fields = row.split(separator: ",")
guard
fields.count == 3,
let id = Int(fields[0]),
let isAdmin = Bool(String(fields[2]))
else { return nil }
return User(id: id, name: String(fields[1]), isAdmin: isAdmin)
}Not only is this code a little messy, but it is also inefficient since we are allocating arrays for the .split and then just immediately throwing away those values.
It would be more straightforward and efficient to instead describe how to consume bits from the beginning of the input and convert that into users. This is what this parser library excels at ๐.
We can start by describing what it means to parse a single row, first by parsing an integer off the front of the string, and then parsing a comma. We can do this by using the Parse type, which acts as an entry point into describing a list of parsers that you want to run one after the other to consume from an input:
let user = Parse(input: Substring.self) {
Int.parser()
","
}Note that this parsing library is quite general, allowing one to parse any kind of input into any kind of output. For this reason we sometimes need to specify the exact input type the parser can process, in this case substrings.
Already this can consume the beginning of the input:
try user.parse("1,") // 1Next we want to take everything up until the next comma for the user's name, and then consume the comma:
let user = Parse(input: Substring.self) {
Int.parser()
","
Prefix { $0 != "," }
","
}And then we want to take the boolean at the end of the row for the user's admin status:
let user = Parse(input: Substring.self) {
Int.parser()
","
Prefix { $0 != "," }
","
Bool.parser()
}Currently this will parse a tuple (Int, Substring, Bool) from the input, and we can .map on that to turn it into a User:
let user = Parse(input: Substring.self) {
Int.parser()
","
Prefix { $0 != "," }
","
Bool.parser()
}
.map { User(id: $0, name: String($1), isAdmin: $2) }To make the data we are parsing to more prominent, we can instead pass the transform closure as the first argument to Parse:
let user = Parse(input: Substring.self) {
User(id: $0, name: String($1), isAdmin: $2)
} with: {
Int.parser()
","
Prefix { $0 != "," }
","
Bool.parser()
}Or we can pass the User initializer to Parse in a point-free style by transforming the Prefix parser's output from a Substring to String first:
let user = Parse(input: Substring.self, User.init(id:name:isAdmin:)) {
Int.parser()
","
Prefix { $0 != "," }.map(String.init)
","
Bool.parser()
}That is enough to parse a single user from the input string:
try user.parse("1,Blob,true")
// User(id: 1, name: "Blob", isAdmin: true)To parse multiple users from the input we can use the Many parser to run the user parser many times:
let users = Many {
user
} separator: {
"\n"
}
try users.parse(input)
// [User(id: 1, name: "Blob", isAdmin: true), ...]Now this parser can process an entire document of users, and the code is simpler and more straightforward than the version that uses .split and .compactMap.
Even better, it's more performant. We've written benchmarks for these two styles of parsing, and the .split-style of parsing is more than twice as slow:
name time std iterations
------------------------------------------------------------------
README Example.Parser: Substring 3426.000 ns ยฑ 63.40 % 385395
README Example.Ad hoc 7631.000 ns ยฑ 47.01 % 169332
Program ended with exit code: 0
Further, if you are willing write your parsers against UTF8View instead of Substring, you can eke out even more performance, more than doubling the speed:
name time std iterations
------------------------------------------------------------------
README Example.Parser: Substring 3693.000 ns ยฑ 81.76 % 349763
README Example.Parser: UTF8 1272.000 ns ยฑ 128.16 % 999150
README Example.Ad hoc 8504.000 ns ยฑ 59.59 % 151417
We can also compare these times to a tool that Apple's Foundation gives us: Scanner. It's a type that allows you to consume from the beginning of strings in order to produce values, and provides a nicer API than using .split:
var users: [User] = []
while scanner.currentIndex != input.endIndex {
guard
let id = scanner.scanInt(),
let _ = scanner.scanString(","),
let name = scanner.scanUpToString(","),
let _ = scanner.scanString(","),
let isAdmin = scanner.scanBool()
else { break }
users.append(User(id: id, name: name, isAdmin: isAdmin))
_ = scanner.scanString("\n")
}However, the Scanner style of parsing is more than 5 times as slow as the substring parser written above, and more than 15 times slower than the UTF-8 parser:
name time std iterations
-------------------------------------------------------------------
README Example.Parser: Substring 3481.000 ns ยฑ 65.04 % 376525
README Example.Parser: UTF8 1207.000 ns ยฑ 110.96 % 1000000
README Example.Ad hoc 8029.000 ns ยฑ 44.44 % 163719
README Example.Scanner 19786.000 ns ยฑ 35.26 % 62125
We can take things even further. With one small change we can turn the parser into a printer.
-let user = Parse(User.init(id:name:isAdmin:)) {
+let user = ParsePrint(.memberwise(User.init(id:name:isAdmin:))) {
Int.parser()
","
Prefix { $0 != "," }.map(String.init)
","
Bool.parser()
}
let users = Many {
user
} separator: {
"\n"
}With this one change we can now print an array of users back into a string:
users.print([
User(id: 1, name: "Blob", isAdmin: true),
User(id: 2, name: "Blob Jr.", isAdmin: false),
User(id: 3, name: "Blob Sr.", isAdmin: true),
])
// 1,Blob,true
// 2,Blob Jr.,false
// 3,Blob Sr.,trueThat's the basics of parsing and printing a simple string format, but there's a lot more operators and tricks to learn in order to performantly parse larger inputs. Read the documentation to dive more deeply into the concepts of parser-printers, and view the benchmarks for more examples of real life parsing scenarios.
This library comes with a benchmark executable that not only demonstrates the performance of the library, but also provides a wide variety of parsing examples:
- Hex color
- Simplified CSV
- Simplified JSON
- ISO8601 date
- HTTP request
- DNS header
- Arithmetic grammar
- Xcode test logs
- and more
These are the times we currently get when running the benchmarks:
MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021)
Apple M1 Pro (10 cores, 8 performance and 2 efficiency)
32 GB (LPDDR5)
name time std iterations
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arithmetic.Parser 6166.000 ns ยฑ 10.73 % 228888
BinaryData.Parser 208.000 ns ยฑ 39.64 % 1000000
Bool.Bool.init 41.000 ns ยฑ 84.71 % 1000000
Bool.Bool.parser 42.000 ns ยฑ 87.86 % 1000000
Bool.Scanner.scanBool 916.000 ns ยฑ 30.55 % 1000000
Color.Parser 208.000 ns ยฑ 28.34 % 1000000
CSV.Parser 3675250.000 ns ยฑ 1.16 % 380
CSV.Ad hoc mutating methods 651333.000 ns ยฑ 1.00 % 2143
Date.Parser 3500.000 ns ยฑ 5.65 % 238924
Date.DateFormatter 23542.000 ns ยฑ 5.50 % 58766
Date.ISO8601DateFormatter 29041.000 ns ยฑ 3.31 % 48028
HTTP.HTTP 10250.000 ns ยฑ 6.24 % 135657
JSON.Parser 38167.000 ns ยฑ 3.26 % 36423
JSON.JSONSerialization 1792.000 ns ยฑ 54.14 % 753770
Numerics.Int.init 0.000 ns ยฑ inf % 1000000
Numerics.Int.parser 83.000 ns ยฑ 67.28 % 1000000
Numerics.Scanner.scanInt 125.000 ns ยฑ 38.65 % 1000000
Numerics.Digits 83.000 ns ยฑ 65.03 % 1000000
Numerics.Comma separated: Int.parser 15364583.000 ns ยฑ 0.63 % 91
Numerics.Comma separated: Scanner.scanInt 50654458.500 ns ยฑ 0.30 % 28
Numerics.Comma separated: String.split 15452542.000 ns ยฑ 1.30 % 90
Numerics.Double.init 42.000 ns ยฑ 152.57 % 1000000
Numerics.Double.parser 166.000 ns ยฑ 45.23 % 1000000
Numerics.Scanner.scanDouble 167.000 ns ยฑ 42.36 % 1000000
Numerics.Comma separated: Double.parser 18539833.000 ns ยฑ 0.57 % 75
Numerics.Comma separated: Scanner.scanDouble 55239167.000 ns ยฑ 0.46 % 25
Numerics.Comma separated: String.split 17636000.000 ns ยฑ 1.34 % 78
PrefixUpTo.Parser: Substring 182041.000 ns ยฑ 1.78 % 7643
PrefixUpTo.Parser: UTF8 40417.000 ns ยฑ 2.71 % 34379
PrefixUpTo.String.range(of:) 49792.000 ns ยฑ 2.70 % 27891
PrefixUpTo.Scanner.scanUpToString 53959.000 ns ยฑ 3.87 % 25745
Race.Parser 59583.000 ns ยฑ 2.78 % 23333
README Example.Parser: Substring 2834.000 ns ยฑ 12.87 % 488264
README Example.Parser: UTF8 1291.000 ns ยฑ 22.65 % 1000000
README Example.Ad hoc 2459.000 ns ยฑ 20.61 % 561930
README Example.Scanner 12084.000 ns ยฑ 5.53 % 115388
String Abstractions.Substring 472083.500 ns ยฑ 1.38 % 2962
String Abstractions.UTF8 196041.000 ns ยฑ 3.38 % 7059
UUID.UUID.init 208.000 ns ยฑ 43.60 % 1000000
UUID.UUID.parser 167.000 ns ยฑ 42.00 % 1000000
Xcode Logs.Parser 4511625.500 ns ยฑ 0.58 % 226
The documentation for releases and main are available here:
If you want to discuss this library or have a question about how to use it to solve a particular problem, there are a number of places you can discuss with fellow Point-Free enthusiasts:
- For long-form discussions, we recommend the discussions tab of this repo.
- For casual chat, we recommend the Point-Free Community Slack.
There are a few other parsing libraries in the Swift community that you might also be interested in:
The printing functionality in this library is inspired by the paper "Invertible syntax descriptions: Unifying parsing and pretty printing", by Tillmann Rendel and Klaus Ostermann.
This library is released under the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.