PEG for Python style indentation

Pure PEG cannot parse indentation.

But peg.js can.

I did a quick-and-dirty experiment (being inspired by Ira Baxter’s comment about cheating) and wrote a simple tokenizer.

For a more complete solution (a complete parser) please see this question: Parse indentation level with PEG.js

/* Initializations */
{
  function start(first, tail) {
    var done = [first[1]];
    for (var i = 0; i < tail.length; i++) {
      done = done.concat(tail[i][1][0])
      done.push(tail[i][1][1]);
    }
    return done;
  }

  var depths = [0];

  function indent(s) {
    var depth = s.length;

    if (depth == depths[0]) return [];

    if (depth > depths[0]) {
      depths.unshift(depth);
      return ["INDENT"];
    }

    var dents = [];
    while (depth < depths[0]) {
      depths.shift();
      dents.push("DEDENT");
    }

    if (depth != depths[0]) dents.push("BADDENT");

    return dents;
  }
}

/* The real grammar */
start   = first:line tail:(newline line)* newline? { return start(first, tail) }
line    = depth:indent s:text                      { return [depth, s] }
indent  = s:" "*                                   { return indent(s) }
text    = c:[^\n]*                                 { return c.join("") }
newline = "\n"                                     {}

depths is a stack of indentations. indent() gives back an array of indentation tokens and start() unwraps the array to make the parser behave somewhat like a stream.

peg.js produces for the text:

alpha
  beta
  gamma
    delta
epsilon
    zeta
  eta
theta
  iota

these results:

[
   "alpha",
   "INDENT",
   "beta",
   "gamma",
   "INDENT",
   "delta",
   "DEDENT",
   "DEDENT",
   "epsilon",
   "INDENT",
   "zeta",
   "DEDENT",
   "BADDENT",
   "eta",
   "theta",
   "INDENT",
   "iota",
   "DEDENT",
   "",
   ""
]

This tokenizer even catches bad indents.