[ragel-users] Some clarifications needed

Etienne Samson samson.etienne at gmail.com
Sat Sep 14 13:44:17 UTC 2013


Hello ragel-users !

I'm trying to build a C parser for IMAP (RFC3501), but since I'm a complete beginner at ragel *and* I want to do it the best way I can think of, I'm having a hard time ;-). Please tell me what you think of the approach I'm aiming for, if I'm a little heavy-handed or whatever…

So, I'm trying to split parts of the ABNF for IMAP in different ragel machines for easy reuse. I already have :
- abnf.rl that contains machine definitions for basic ABNF tokens (ALPHA, BIT, …),
- rfc3501.rl which contains basic "common" things between what will become my different machines (tag, address, …),
- rfc3501_response.rl which contains stuff relating to server replies, (response, response_tagged, …)
- imap_parser.rl that is supposed to be in charge of parsing a server's response into my own "message" C structure. This is the only one I'm "write"ing directly.

My previous attempt was to copy/paste the whole ABNF from the RFC, convert it to ragel syntax and pray that it works. Luckily, it didn't, and since I ended up as the happy owner of a ragel state machine that has 3070 transitions and that I couldn't understand why it fails and where, I'm scaling back, and switching to divide-and-conquer (the only thing gained is that I can now look up a rule in my old file and integrate it pretty quickly after more thorough testing).

So, here's a list of the questions I have :

- I feel a little lost at the difference between a machine definition and a machine instantiation. It seems it works like C functions, definition = prototype and instantiation = actual function ? But even though they're different, you can attach actions to both of them. I understand that you can use definition to have a single place to tell ragel what actual syntax to parse (example from rfc3501_response, 'response_untagged = "tag SP resp_cond_state CRLF";'). But I can't use instantiations from one of my including files.

- What does "main := |* stuff *|" mean ? I haven't been able to grasp what ragel does with it, I've seen no explanation in the user guide, and quite a few examples I found use that. In fact, I was thinking it was part of the instantiation syntax until I found examples that weren't using that (like mailbox.rl).

Cordialement, 
Etienne Samson
--
samson.etienne at gmail.com


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