You can install the package via Composer:

composer require ryangjchandler/lexical

Let's write a simple lexer for mathematical expressions. The expressions can contain numbers (only integers) and a handful of operators (+, -, *, /).

Begin by creating a new enumeration that describes the token types.

enum TokenType
{
    case Number;
    case Add;
    case Subtract;
    case Multiply;
    case Divide;
}

Lexical provides a set of attributes that can be added to each case in an enumeration:

• Regex - accepts a single regular expression.
• Literal - accepts a string of continuous characters.
• Error - designates a specific enumeration case as the "error" type.

Using those attributes with TokenType looks like this.

enum TokenType
{
    #[Regex("[0-9]+")]
    case Number;
    
    #[Literal("+")]
    case Add;
    
    #[Literal("-")]
    case Subtract;
    
    #[Literal("*")]
    case Multiply;

    #[Literal("/")]
    case Divide;
}

With the attributes in place, we can start to build a lexer using the LexicalBuilder.

$lexer = (new LexicalBuilder)
    ->readTokenTypesFrom(TokenType::class)
    ->build();

The readTokenTypesFrom() method is used to tell the builder where we should look for the various tokenising attributes. The build() method will take those attributes and return an object that implements LexerInterface, configured to look for the specified token types.

Then it's just a case of calling the tokenise() method on the lexer object to retrieve an array of tokens.

$tokens = $lexer->tokenise('1+2'); // -> [[TokenType::Number, '1', Span(0, 1)], [TokenType::Add, '+', Span(1, 2)], [TokenType::Number, '2', Span(2, 3)]]

The tokenise() method returns a list of tuples, where the first item is the "type" (TokenType in this example), the second item is the "literal" (a string containing the matched characters) and the third item is the "span" of the token (the start and end positions in the original string).

Continuing with the example of a mathematical expression, the lexer currently understands 1+2 but it would fail to tokenise 1 + 2 (added whitespace). This is because by default it expects each and every possible character to fall into a pattern.

The whitespace is insignificant in this case, so can be skipped safely. To do this, we need to add a new Lexer attribute to the TokenType enumeration and pass through a regular expression that matches the characters we want to skip.

#[Lexer(skip: "[ \t\n\f]+")]
enum TokenType
{
    // ...
}

Now the lexer will skip over any whitespace characters and successfully tokenise 1 + 2.

When a lexer encounters an unexpected character, it will throw an UnexpectedCharacterException.

try {
    $tokens = $lexer->tokenise();
} catch (UnexpectedCharacterException $e) {
    dd($e->character, $e->position);
}

As mentioned above, there is an Error attribute that can be used to mark an enum case as the "error" type.

enum TokenType
{
    // ...

    #[Error]
    case Error;
}

Now when the input is tokenised, the unrecognised character will be consumed like other tokens and will have a type of TokenType::Error.

$tokens = $lexer->tokenise('1 % 2'); // -> [[TokenType::Number, '1'], [TokenType::Error, '%'], [TokenType::Number, '2']]

If you prefer to work with dedicated objects instead of Lexical's default tuple values for each token, you can provide a custom callback to map the matched token type and literal into a custom object.

class Token
{
    public function __construct(
        public readonly TokenType $type,
        public readonly string $literal,
        public readonly Span $span,
    ) {}
}

$lexer = (new LexicalBuilder)
    ->readTokenTypesFrom(TokenType::class)
    ->produceTokenUsing(fn (TokenType $type, string $literal, Span $span) => new Token($type, $literal, $span))
    ->build();

$lexer->tokenise('1 + 2'); // -> [Token { type: TokenType::Number, literal: "1" }, ...]

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Please see CHANGELOG for more information on what has changed recently.

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

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• Ryan Chandler
• All Contributors

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.