VTParse - an implementation of Paul Williams' DEC compatible state machine parser http://www.vt100.net/emu/dec_ansi_parser

Author: Joshua Haberman joshua@reverberate.org

This code is in the public domain.

BUILDING

Ruby is required at build time to generate the tables in C. To build the library and test program, just type make:

$ make <this will create the test program and libvtparse.a>

I have only tested the build on Mac OS X and Linux, but it should build anywhere Ruby and GCC are available. Other C compilers should work as well, I just haven't tried them.

TEST PROGRAM

The test program shows how to use vtparse. To see what kind of data is returned by the library, try:

---

$ vim > terminaloutput <type ':q<ENTER>' to exit vim, even though you won't see it> $ ./test < terminaloutput | head -16 Received action ESC_DISPATCH Char: 0x37 ('7')

Received action CSI_DISPATCH Char: 0x68 ('h') 1 Intermediate chars: 0x3f ('?') 1 Parameters: 47

Received action CSI_DISPATCH Char: 0x68 ('h') 1 Intermediate chars: 0x3f ('?') 1 Parameters: 1

---

VERIFYING

You can also verify the validity of the state tables by running:

$ ruby vtparse_check_tables.rb Tables had all necessary transitions defined.

This checks to make sure that state transitions are defined for all states, for all characters 0-0xA0.

TODO

One possible enhancement is to allow the client to pass a return value from the callback to say "stop parsing." The vtparse() function could return the number of bytes consumed from the input buffer. This would be quite simple to do if someone needed this functionality, but I don't, so I didn't bother.

Currently there is no explicit character set support. I don't know enough about the relevant standards to know if vtparse should have character set support, or what that support would look like. Suggestions along this vein are very welcome!

CREDITS

Thanks to Julian Scheid for several bugfixes and enhancements.