Poor man’s “lexer” for C#

The original version I posted here as an answer had a problem in that it only worked while there was more than one “Regex” that matched the current expression. That is, as soon as only one Regex matched, it would return a token – whereas most people want the Regex to be “greedy”. This was especially the case for things such as “quoted strings”.

The only solution that sits on top of Regex is to read the input line-by-line (which means you cannot have tokens that span multiple lines). I can live with this – it is, after all, a poor man’s lexer! Besides, it’s usually useful to get line number information out of the Lexer in any case.

So, here’s a new version that addresses these issues. Credit also goes to this

public interface IMatcher
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Return the number of characters that this "regex" or equivalent
    /// matches.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="text">The text to be matched</param>
    /// <returns>The number of characters that matched</returns>
    int Match(string text);
}

sealed class RegexMatcher : IMatcher
{
    private readonly Regex regex;
    public RegexMatcher(string regex) => this.regex = new Regex(string.Format("^{0}", regex));

    public int Match(string text)
    {
        var m = regex.Match(text);
        return m.Success ? m.Length : 0;
    }
    public override string ToString() => regex.ToString();
}

public sealed class TokenDefinition
{
    public readonly IMatcher Matcher;
    public readonly object Token;

    public TokenDefinition(string regex, object token)
    {
        this.Matcher = new RegexMatcher(regex);
        this.Token = token;
    }
}

public sealed class Lexer : IDisposable
{
    private readonly TextReader reader;
    private readonly TokenDefinition[] tokenDefinitions;

    private string lineRemaining;

    public Lexer(TextReader reader, TokenDefinition[] tokenDefinitions)
    {
        this.reader = reader;
        this.tokenDefinitions = tokenDefinitions;
        nextLine();
    }

    private void nextLine()
    {
        do
        {
            lineRemaining = reader.ReadLine();
            ++LineNumber;
            Position = 0;
        } while (lineRemaining != null && lineRemaining.Length == 0);
    }

    public bool Next()
    {
        if (lineRemaining == null)
            return false;
        foreach (var def in tokenDefinitions)
        {
            var matched = def.Matcher.Match(lineRemaining);
            if (matched > 0)
            {
                Position += matched;
                Token = def.Token;
                TokenContents = lineRemaining.Substring(0, matched);
                lineRemaining = lineRemaining.Substring(matched);
                if (lineRemaining.Length == 0)
                    nextLine();

                return true;
            }
        }
        throw new Exception(string.Format("Unable to match against any tokens at line {0} position {1} \"{2}\"",
                                          LineNumber, Position, lineRemaining));
    }

    public string TokenContents { get; private set; }
    public object Token   { get; private set; }
    public int LineNumber { get; private set; }
    public int Position   { get; private set; }

    public void Dispose() => reader.Dispose();
}

Example program:

string sample = @"( one (two 456 -43.2 "" \"" quoted"" ))";

var defs = new TokenDefinition[]
{
    // Thanks to [steven levithan][2] for this great quoted string
            // regex
    new TokenDefinition(@"([""'])(?:\\\1|.)*?\1", "QUOTED-STRING"),
    // Thanks to http://www.regular-expressions.info/floatingpoint.html
    new TokenDefinition(@"[-+]?\d*\.\d+([eE][-+]?\d+)?", "FLOAT"),
    new TokenDefinition(@"[-+]?\d+", "INT"),
    new TokenDefinition(@"#t", "TRUE"),
    new TokenDefinition(@"#f", "FALSE"),
    new TokenDefinition(@"[*<>\?\-+/A-Za-z->!]+", "SYMBOL"),
    new TokenDefinition(@"\.", "DOT"),
    new TokenDefinition(@"\(", "LEFT"),
    new TokenDefinition(@"\)", "RIGHT"),
    new TokenDefinition(@"\s", "SPACE")
};

TextReader r = new StringReader(sample);
Lexer l = new Lexer(r, defs);
while (l.Next())
    Console.WriteLine("Token: {0} Contents: {1}", l.Token, l.TokenContents);

Output:

Token: LEFT Contents: (
Token: SPACE Contents:
Token: SYMBOL Contents: one
Token: SPACE Contents:
Token: LEFT Contents: (
Token: SYMBOL Contents: two
Token: SPACE Contents:
Token: INT Contents: 456
Token: SPACE Contents:
Token: FLOAT Contents: -43.2
Token: SPACE Contents:
Token: QUOTED-STRING Contents: " \" quoted"
Token: SPACE Contents:
Token: RIGHT Contents: )
Token: RIGHT Contents: )