Which tool to use to parse programming languages in Python?

Question

Which Python tool can you recommend to parse programming languages? It should allow for a readable representation of the language grammar inside the source, and it should be abl

Answer 1

For a more complicated parser I would use pyparsing. Pyparsing

Here is the parsed example from there home page

from pyparsing import Word, alphas

greet = Word(alphas) + "," + Word(alphas) + "!"  # <-- grammar 

defined here

hello = "Hello, World!"
print(hello, "->", greet.parseString(hello))

Answer 2

For simple task I tend to use the shlex module.

See http://wiki.python.org/moin/LanguageParsing for evaluation of language parsing in python.

Answer 3

Antlr generates LL(*) parsers. That can be good, but sometimes removing all left recursion can be cumbersome.

If you are LALR(1)-savvy, you can use PyBison. It has similar syntax to Yacc, if you know what it is. Plus, there are a lot of people out there that know how yacc works.