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. (Windows and OSX are 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 (not yet implemented)
- LALR(8) (not yet implemented)
- 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
- make
- 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 install, type make. To run the built-in test suite, type make test.
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.
There is not currently a make install target; to make Hammer available system-wide, copy libhammer.a to /usr/lib/ (or /usr/local/lib/, or wherever ld will find it) and hammer.h to /usr/include/.
Usage
Just #include <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.