Hammer is a parsing library. Like many modern parsing libraries, it provides a parser combinator interface for writing grammars as inline domain-specific languages, but Hammer also provides a variety of parsing backends. It's also bit-oriented rather than character-oriented, making it ideal for parsing binary data such as images, network packets, audio, and executables.

Hammer is written in C, but will provide bindings for other languages. If you don't see a language you're interested in on the list, just ask.

Hammer currently builds under Linux and OS X. (Windows is coming.)

Features

• Bit-oriented -- grammars can include single-bit flags or multi-bit constructs that span character boundaries, with no hassle
• Thread-safe, reentrant
• Benchmarking for parsing backends -- determine empirically which backend will be most time-efficient for your grammar
• Parsing backends:
  • Packrat parsing
  • LL(k)
  • GLR
  • LALR
  • Regular expressions
• Language bindings:
  • C++ (not yet implemented)
  • Java
  • Python (not yet implemented)
  • Ruby (not yet implemented)
  • Perl (not yet implemented)
  • Go (not yet implemented)
  • PHP (not yet implemented)
  • .NET (not yet implemented)

Installing

Prerequisites

• SCons
• a JDK

Optional Dependencies

• pkg-config (for make test)
• glib-2.0 (>= 2.29) (for make test)
• glib-2.0-dev (for make test)

To build, type scons. To run the built-in test suite, type scons test. For a debug build, add --variant=debug

If jni.h and jni_md.h aren't already somewhere on your include path, prepend C_INCLUDE_PATH=/path/to/jdk/include to that.

To make Hammer available system-wide, use scons install. This places include files in /usr/local/include/hammer and library files in /usr/local/lib by default; to install elsewhere, add a prefix=<destination> argument, e.g. scons install prefix=$HOME.

Usage

Just #include <hammer/hammer.h> and link with -lhammer.

Examples

The examples/ directory contains some simple examples, currently including:

• base64
• DNS

Community

Please join us at #hammer on irc.upstandinghackers.com if you have any questions or just want to talk about parsing.

Contact

You can also email us at hammer@upstandinghackers.com.