package pyre-ast

  1. Overview
  2. Docs

pyre-ast

pyre-ast is an OCaml library to parse Python files.

The library features its full-fidelity to the official Python spec. Apart from a few technical edge cases, as long as a given file can be parsed by the CPython interpreter, pyre-ast will be able to parse the file without any problem. Furthermore, abstract syntax trees obtained from pyre-ast is guaranteed to 100% match the results obtained by Python's own ast.parse API, down to every AST node and every line and column number.

Another notable feature of this library is that it represents the Python syntax using the tagless-final style. This style typically offers more flexibility and extensibility for the downstream consumers of the syntax, and allow them to build up their analysis without explicitly constructing a syntax tree. On the other hand, this library does offer a tranditional "concrete" syntax tree structure as well, for developers who are less familiar with the tagless-final approach and more familiar with standard algebraic data type representation.

Quick Start

Installation

To install pyre-ast with opam, you can run opam install pyre-ast.

Use in a Dune project

To use pyre-ast in your dune project, you can add pyre-ast to the libraries stanza in your dune file. For example,

(library
  (name mylib) (libraries pyre-ast))

Parsing APIs

All parsing APIs are located in the PyreAst.Parser module.

Take a look at PyreAst.Parser.Concrete if all you want is to obtain a traditional abstract syntax tree. For example, the following function takes a string, parse it as a Python module, and return the corresponding AST:

let example content =
  let open PyreAst.Parser in
  with_context (fun context ->
  	match Concrete.parse_module ~context content with
  	| Result.Error { Error.message; line; column } ->
  	  let message = 
  	    Format.sprintf "Parsing error at line %d, column %d: %s"
  	    line column message
  	  in
  	  failwith message
  	| Result.Ok ast -> ast
  )

Alternatively if you want to use the tagless-final approach, you want to use the PyreAst.Parser.TaglessFinal module. This module exposes the same set of interfaces as PyreAst.Parser.Concrete, except each interface now takes an additional spec argument which reifies your downstream logic.

Syntax Representation

pyre-ast closely mimics Python's ast module for its representation of the Python abstract syntax. There is almost a 1:1 correspondence between classes in the ast module and entities in pyre-ast's interfaces. If you are unsure about the meaning of certain interface in pyre-ast, Python's own documentation might be a useful external reference.

As mentioned above, pyre-ast supports two flavors of syntax representations. The traditional "concrete" abstract syntax tree is defined in module PyreAst.Concrete, whereas the tagless-finaly style syntax is defined in module PyreAst.TaglessFinal. Note that under the hood, the former is implemented on top of the latter, so only the tagless-final APIs are considered the "core" APIs of this library.

API References