chomp/span

Spans are so useful in lexing, parsing, and error reporting that Chomp has a separate module dedicated to them. The nice thing about Spans is you don’t have to include them in your parse result right away. If you find that you could use some helpful location information, simply take advantage of the fact that chomp.token returns the location of the token it consumes, and chomp.get_pos allows you to attain the location of anything else.

Types

Span

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A source span is a range into the source string that represents the start and end of a lexeme in a human-readable way. That means instead of a straight index into the string you get a row and column for the start and end instead!

pub type Span {
  Span(
    row_start: Int,
    col_start: Int,
    row_end: Int,
    col_end: Int,
  )
}

Constructors

Span(row_start: Int, col_start: Int, row_end: Int, col_end: Int)

Functions

combine

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pub fn combine(first: Span, second: Span) -> Span

Combine two Spans into one that represents the combined range.

   first blah second
1. ~~~~~   2. ~~~~~~
3. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Span(1, 1, 1, 6).
Span(1, 12, 1, 18).
(combined) Span(1, 1, 1, 18).

Often when parsing you’ll collect a start and end span that you want to combine and include in the AST. That’s where this function is most useful!

use start_span <- do(chomp.token(LParen))
// ...
use end_span <- do(chomp.token(RParen))
let location = span.combine(start_span, end_span)

return(SomeASTNode(.., location))

🚨 Note that the second Span must come after the first location-wise.