Using latest (v7) nom crate.
Trying to build a parser capable of extracting code blocks from markdown. In the flavor of markdown I need to support, a code block only ends if there is three grave/backtick characters on a line by themselves, excepting perhaps followed by whitespace.
Here is an example, where I replace backticks with single quotes (') to make editing with the StackOverflow markdown sane:
'''python
print("""
'''")
// this is all still a code block
'''
The obvious solution is to just use take_until("'''") however, that will end the take early, since that just does a search for the first occurrence of ''' which is not accurate. I need the termination condition to be tuple((tag(code_end), space0, newline)).
The next obvious solution is to use regular expressions as the pattern in take_until... but I would prefer to avoid that. Is there any prebuilt parser (or available in another crate) that will take all until a parser returns Ok?
use nom::IResult;
use nom::combinator::opt;
use nom::sequence::{terminated, tuple};
use nom::bytes::complete::{tag, take_until};
use nom::character::complete::{newline, space0, alpha1};
fn code(i: &[u8]) -> IResult<&[u8], &[u8]> {
let (input, _) = tuple((tag("'''"), opt(alpha1), tag("\n")))(i)?;
let terminator = tuple((tag("'''"), space0, newline));
let (input, contents) = terminated(take_until("'''"), terminator)(input)?;
Ok((input, contents))
}
fn main() {
let test = &b"'''python
print(\"\"\"
'''\"\"\"
// this is all still a code block
'''
";
assert!(code(&test[..]).is_ok());
}
the above assertion will fail. However, if you remove the line with the three (''') single quotes, it will pass. This is because of the difference between terminator and take_all("'''"). What is my best pattern for solving this problem?
Thanks for any help. I have a feeling I'm missing something obvious or just doing something wrong. Let me know if anything isn't clear.
Here is a link to the above example in the Rust Playground for convenience: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2021&gist=d5459edded1e4258ba3e034658ea4acf
I think the proper combinator would be many_till:
Applies the parser f until the parser g produces a result.
That combined with anychar will return a Vec<char> for your code block.
I think there is no anybyte in nom, but you can easily write it yourself if you prefer to get Vec<u8>.
Or if you want to avoid allocating and want a slice referencing to the original slice, and don't mind a bit of unsafe you can ignore the consumed characters and take compute the slice from the start and end pointers (playground):
fn code(i: &[u8]) -> IResult<&[u8], &[u8]> {
let (input, _) = tuple((tag("'''"), opt(alpha1), tag("\n")))(i)?;
let terminator = tuple((tag("'''"), space0, newline));
let start = input;
let (input, (_, (end, _, _))) = many_till(map(anychar, drop), terminator)(input)?;
let len = unsafe { end.as_ptr().offset_from(start.as_ptr()) as usize};
Ok((input, &start[..len]))
}
What I am currently using is this
fn main() {
let a = "abc123";
let b = "1a2b3c";
println!("{}", a[0..1].chars().all(char::is_numeric));
println!("{}", b[0..1].chars().all(char::is_numeric));
}
Are there a more idiomatic and/or simpler way to do this?
Note: The string is guaranteed to be non empty and made of ASCII characters.
If you are sure that it is non-empty and made out of ascii, you can operate directly on bytes (u8):
a.as_bytes()[0].is_ascii_digit()
or
(b'0'..=b'9').contains(&a.as_bytes()[0])
More general setting (and, in my opinion, more idiomatic):
a.chars().next().unwrap().is_numeric()
The reason all this looks a bit unwieldy is that there may be some things going wrong (that are easily overlooked in other languages):
string might be empty => leads us into Option/unwrap-land
strings in rust are UTF-8 (which basically complicates random-accessing into string; note that rust does not only consider 0-9 as numeric, as shown here)
Starting from your original solution and parse:
fn main() {
let a = "abc123";
let b = "1a2b3c";
println!("{:?}", a[0..1].parse::<u8>().is_ok()); // false
println!("{:?}", b[0..1].parse::<u8>().is_ok()); // true
}
If the first character is guaranteed to be ASCII and the string is not empty.
Playground
I am attempting to write a lexer for fun, however something keeps bothering me.
let mut chars: Vec<char> = Vec::new();
let mut contents = String::new();
let mut tokens: Vec<&String> = Vec::new();
let mut append = String::new();
//--snip--
for _char in chars {
append += &_char.to_string();
append = append.trim().to_string();
if append.contains("print") {
println!("print found at: \n{}", append);
append = "".to_string();
}
}
Any time I want to do something as simple as append a &str to a String I have to convert it using .to_string, String::from(), .to_owned, etc.
Is there something I am doing wrong, so that I don't have to constantly do this, or is this the primary way of appending?
If you're trying to do something with a type, check the documentation. From the documentation for String:
push: "Appends the given char to the end of this String."
push_str: "Appends a given string slice onto the end of this String."
It's important to understand the differences between String and &str, and why different methods accept and return each of them.
A &str or &mut str are usually preferred in function arguments and return types. That's because they are just pointers to data so nothing needs to be copied or moved when they are passed around.
A String is returned when a function needs to do some new allocation, while &str and &mut str are slices into an existing String. Even though &mut str is mutable, you can't mutate it in a way that increases its length because that would require additional allocation.
The trim function is able to return a &str slice because that doesn't involve mutating the original string - a trimmed string is just a substring, which a slice perfectly describes. But sometimes that isn't possible; for example, a function that pads a string with an extra character would have to return a String because it would be allocating new memory.
You can reduce the number of type conversions in your code by choosing different methods:
for c in chars {
append.push(c); // append += &_char.to_string();
append = append.trim().to_string();
if append.contains("print") {
println!("print found at: \n{}", append);
append.clear(); // append = "".to_string();
}
}
There isn't anything like a trim_in_place method for String, so the way you have done it is probably the only way.
Is there a function to do something like this:
fn string_to_unicode_char(s: &str) -> Option<char> {
// ...
}
fn main() {
let s = r"\u{00AA}"; // note the raw string literal!
string_to_unicode_char(s).unwrap();
}
Note that r"\u{00AA}" uses a raw string i. e. it isn't a Unicode sequence but 8 separate symbols, as \ u { 0 0 A A }.
I need to interpret/convert/parse this string and return a char if all is good, None otherwise. I don't have any experience with Unicode, so any ideas are welcome.
I believe the function you are looking for is char::from_u32:
fn string_to_unicode_char(s: &str) -> Option<char> {
// Do something more appropriate to find the actual number
let number = &s[3..7];
u32::from_str_radix(number, 16)
.ok()
.and_then(std::char::from_u32)
}
fn main() {
let s = r"\u{00AA}"; // note the raw string literal!
let ch = string_to_unicode_char(s);
assert_eq!(ch, Some('\u{00AA}'));
}
I indeed completely misunderstood your question; my old answer can be seen in the edit logs
Is there a builtin function to parse a string containing a Rust unicode escape into the corresponding unicode character?
AFAIK, no, there is not a builtin function to do that.
The answer to "how to do it yourself" is a bit broad, as there are many ways to do it (and it's not clear whether you also want to parse standard escapes, such as "\n").
Use a regex
Do simple, naive manual parsing
Embed it into a bigger lexer (the function in the Rust compiler parsing such unicode escapes)
I'd like to capitalize the first letter of a &str. It's a simple problem and I hope for a simple solution. Intuition tells me to do something like this:
let mut s = "foobar";
s[0] = s[0].to_uppercase();
But &strs can't be indexed like this. The only way I've been able to do it seems overly convoluted. I convert the &str to an iterator, convert the iterator to a vector, upper case the first item in the vector, which creates an iterator, which I index into, creating an Option, which I unwrap to give me the upper-cased first letter. Then I convert the vector into an iterator, which I convert into a String, which I convert to a &str.
let s1 = "foobar";
let mut v: Vec<char> = s1.chars().collect();
v[0] = v[0].to_uppercase().nth(0).unwrap();
let s2: String = v.into_iter().collect();
let s3 = &s2;
Is there an easier way than this, and if so, what? If not, why is Rust designed this way?
Similar question
Why is it so convoluted?
Let's break it down, line-by-line
let s1 = "foobar";
We've created a literal string that is encoded in UTF-8. UTF-8 allows us to encode the 1,114,112 code points of Unicode in a manner that's pretty compact if you come from a region of the world that types in mostly characters found in ASCII, a standard created in 1963. UTF-8 is a variable length encoding, which means that a single code point might take from 1 to 4 bytes. The shorter encodings are reserved for ASCII, but many Kanji take 3 bytes in UTF-8.
let mut v: Vec<char> = s1.chars().collect();
This creates a vector of characters. A character is a 32-bit number that directly maps to a code point. If we started with ASCII-only text, we've quadrupled our memory requirements. If we had a bunch of characters from the astral plane, then maybe we haven't used that much more.
v[0] = v[0].to_uppercase().nth(0).unwrap();
This grabs the first code point and requests that it be converted to an uppercase variant. Unfortunately for those of us who grew up speaking English, there's not always a simple one-to-one mapping of a "small letter" to a "big letter". Side note: we call them upper- and lower-case because one box of letters was above the other box of letters back in the day.
This code will panic when a code point has no corresponding uppercase variant. I'm not sure if those exist, actually. It could also semantically fail when a code point has an uppercase variant that has multiple characters, such as the German ß. Note that ß may never actually be capitalized in The Real World, this is the just example I can always remember and search for. As of 2017-06-29, in fact, the official rules of German spelling have been updated so that both "ẞ" and "SS" are valid capitalizations!
let s2: String = v.into_iter().collect();
Here we convert the characters back into UTF-8 and require a new allocation to store them in, as the original variable was stored in constant memory so as to not take up memory at run time.
let s3 = &s2;
And now we take a reference to that String.
It's a simple problem
Unfortunately, this is not true. Perhaps we should endeavor to convert the world to Esperanto?
I presume char::to_uppercase already properly handles Unicode.
Yes, I certainly hope so. Unfortunately, Unicode isn't enough in all cases.
Thanks to huon for pointing out the Turkish I, where both the upper (İ) and lower case (i) versions have a dot. That is, there is no one proper capitalization of the letter i; it depends on the locale of the the source text as well.
why the need for all data type conversions?
Because the data types you are working with are important when you are worried about correctness and performance. A char is 32-bits and a string is UTF-8 encoded. They are different things.
indexing could return a multi-byte, Unicode character
There may be some mismatched terminology here. A char is a multi-byte Unicode character.
Slicing a string is possible if you go byte-by-byte, but the standard library will panic if you are not on a character boundary.
One of the reasons that indexing a string to get a character was never implemented is because so many people misuse strings as arrays of ASCII characters. Indexing a string to set a character could never be efficient - you'd have to be able to replace 1-4 bytes with a value that is also 1-4 bytes, causing the rest of the string to bounce around quite a lot.
to_uppercase could return an upper case character
As mentioned above, ß is a single character that, when capitalized, becomes two characters.
Solutions
See also trentcl's answer which only uppercases ASCII characters.
Original
If I had to write the code, it'd look like:
fn some_kind_of_uppercase_first_letter(s: &str) -> String {
let mut c = s.chars();
match c.next() {
None => String::new(),
Some(f) => f.to_uppercase().chain(c).collect(),
}
}
fn main() {
println!("{}", some_kind_of_uppercase_first_letter("joe"));
println!("{}", some_kind_of_uppercase_first_letter("jill"));
println!("{}", some_kind_of_uppercase_first_letter("von Hagen"));
println!("{}", some_kind_of_uppercase_first_letter("ß"));
}
But I'd probably search for uppercase or unicode on crates.io and let someone smarter than me handle it.
Improved
Speaking of "someone smarter than me", Veedrac points out that it's probably more efficient to convert the iterator back into a slice after the first capital codepoints are accessed. This allows for a memcpy of the rest of the bytes.
fn some_kind_of_uppercase_first_letter(s: &str) -> String {
let mut c = s.chars();
match c.next() {
None => String::new(),
Some(f) => f.to_uppercase().collect::<String>() + c.as_str(),
}
}
Is there an easier way than this, and if so, what? If not, why is Rust designed this way?
Well, yes and no. Your code is, as the other answer pointed out, not correct, and will panic if you give it something like བོད་སྐད་ལ་. So doing this with Rust's standard library is even harder than you initially thought.
However, Rust is designed to encourage code reuse and make bringing in libraries easy. So the idiomatic way to capitalize a string is actually quite palatable:
extern crate inflector;
use inflector::Inflector;
let capitalized = "some string".to_title_case();
It's not especially convoluted if you are able to limit your input to ASCII-only strings.
Since Rust 1.23, str has a make_ascii_uppercase method (in older Rust versions, it was available through the AsciiExt trait). This means you can uppercase ASCII-only string slices with relative ease:
fn make_ascii_titlecase(s: &mut str) {
if let Some(r) = s.get_mut(0..1) {
r.make_ascii_uppercase();
}
}
This will turn "taylor" into "Taylor", but it won't turn "édouard" into "Édouard". (playground)
Use with caution.
I did it this way:
fn str_cap(s: &str) -> String {
format!("{}{}", (&s[..1].to_string()).to_uppercase(), &s[1..])
}
If it is not an ASCII string:
fn str_cap(s: &str) -> String {
format!("{}{}", s.chars().next().unwrap().to_uppercase(),
s.chars().skip(1).collect::<String>())
}
The OP's approach taken further:
replace the first character with its uppercase representation
let mut s = "foobar".to_string();
let r = s.remove(0).to_uppercase().to_string() + &s;
or
let r = format!("{}{s}", s.remove(0).to_uppercase());
println!("{r}");
works with Unicode characters as well eg. "😎foobar"
The first guaranteed to be an ASCII character, can changed to a capital letter in place:
let mut s = "foobar".to_string();
if !s.is_empty() {
s[0..1].make_ascii_uppercase(); // Foobar
}
Panics with a non ASCII character in first position!
Since the method to_uppercase() returns a new string, you should be able to just add the remainder of the string like so.
this was tested in rust version 1.57+ but is likely to work in any version that supports slice.
fn uppercase_first_letter(s: &str) -> String {
s[0..1].to_uppercase() + &s[1..]
}
Here's a version that is a bit slower than #Shepmaster's improved version, but also more idiomatic:
fn capitalize_first(s: &str) -> String {
let mut chars = s.chars();
chars
.next()
.map(|first_letter| first_letter.to_uppercase())
.into_iter()
.flatten()
.chain(chars)
.collect()
}
This is how I solved this problem, notice I had to check if self is not ascii before transforming to uppercase.
trait TitleCase {
fn title(&self) -> String;
}
impl TitleCase for &str {
fn title(&self) -> String {
if !self.is_ascii() || self.is_empty() {
return String::from(*self);
}
let (head, tail) = self.split_at(1);
head.to_uppercase() + tail
}
}
pub fn main() {
println!("{}", "bruno".title());
println!("{}", "b".title());
println!("{}", "🦀".title());
println!("{}", "ß".title());
println!("{}", "".title());
println!("{}", "བོད་སྐད་ལ".title());
}
Output
Bruno
B
🦀
ß
བོད་སྐད་ལ
Inspired by get_mut examples I code something like this:
fn make_capital(in_str : &str) -> String {
let mut v = String::from(in_str);
v.get_mut(0..1).map(|s| { s.make_ascii_uppercase(); &*s });
v
}