KotlinSpirit: A Lightweight Text Parsing Library for Kotlin

KotlinSpirit is a lightweight library for parsing text in Kotlin, inspired by the C++ boost spirit library. It aims to provide a better alternative to regular expressions by offering a more readable, reusable, and performant solution for parsing text.

Regular expressions can be difficult to debug and read, and they often perform poorly when dealing with large texts. KotlinSpirit addresses these issues by providing a simple library with compile-time expression checking.

To get started with KotlinSpirit, you can add the following dependency to your build.gradle file:

dependencies {
    implementation 'com.example:kotlinspirit:1.0.0'
}

Once you have added the dependency, you can start creating parsers using the basic rules and operators provided by KotlinSpirit. The library consists of basic rules defined in the Rules object namespace.

Let's take a look at a simple example of creating a parser for a key-value pair, where the key is "name" and the value is "age":

import com.example.kotlinspirit.Rules.*

val parser = sequence(
    str("name="),
    int(),
    str(", age="),
    int()
)

val input = "name=John, age=30"
val result = parser.parse(input)

if (result.isSuccess) {
    val name = result.get(0)
    val age = result.get(1)
    println("Name: $name, Age: $age")
} else {
    println("Parsing failed")
}

In this example, we use the str and int basic rules, along with the sequence operator and the parse function. The parse function checks if a string matches the parser from the beginning to the end. If the parsing is successful, we can retrieve the parsed values using the get function.

KotlinSpirit also provides other useful parser functions and advanced features for handling more complex parsing scenarios. You can find more information and examples in the official documentation.

With KotlinSpirit, developers can easily parse text in Kotlin without the limitations and complexities of regular expressions. It offers a more intuitive and efficient way to handle text parsing tasks, making it a valuable tool for developers working with Kotlin.

Give KotlinSpirit a try and let us know what you think! Your feedback is important to us as we continue to improve and enhance the library.