🔬 Dissect

A pure-PHP toolkit for building custom lexers and LALR(1) parsers — fast, type-safe, and dependency-free.

✨ What is Dissect?

Dissect is a pure-PHP library for lexical and syntactical analysis — the foundational building blocks for any language tooling: expression evaluators, template engines, DSL interpreters, query parsers, and more.

It powers the GoAOP framework, where it parses pointcut DSL expressions into an AST for aspect-oriented programming.

Data flow

Input String
    │
    ▼
┌─────────┐      ┌──────────────┐      ┌──────────────────┐
│  Lexer  │ ───▶ │ TokenStream  │ ───▶ │  LALR(1) Parser  │ ───▶ Result / AST
└─────────┘      └──────────────┘      └──────────────────┘
                                               ▲
                                         Grammar (rules
                                          + callbacks)

🚀 Key Features

🔤 Flexible Lexers

📐 LALR(1) Parser

• Full LALR(1) grammar support — handles the vast majority of real-world grammars
• Fluent grammar API — define productions and semantic actions with readable PHP closures
• Operator precedence & associativity — built-in left(), right(), nonassoc() declarations
• Conflict resolution — configurable strategies: shift-wins, longer-reduce, earlier-reduce
• Precomputed parse tables — analyze once, serialize to PHP file, load instantly in production

🌳 AST Construction

• CommonNode — ready-to-use tree node with named children and arbitrary attributes
• Countable & iterable — traverse subtrees with standard PHP constructs

🛠 Developer Experience

• Zero runtime dependencies — only Symfony Console as an optional CLI dep
• PHPStan level 10 — fully typed with generics, array shapes, and readonly properties
• CLI tool — dump parse tables and visualize automaton states as Graphviz graphs

📦 Installation

composer require goaop/dissect

⚡ Quick Example

use Dissect\Lexer\SimpleLexer;
use Dissect\Parser\Grammar;
use Dissect\Parser\LALR1\Parser;

// 1. Define a lexer
$lexer = new SimpleLexer();
$lexer->regex('INT',   '/[0-9]+/')
      ->token('PLUS',  '+')
      ->token('MINUS', '-')
      ->regex('WS',    '/\s+/')
      ->skip('WS');

// 2. Define a grammar
$grammar = new Grammar();
$grammar('Expr')
    ->is('Expr', 'PLUS', 'Expr')
    ->call(fn($l, $_, $r) => $l + $r)

    ->is('Expr', 'MINUS', 'Expr')
    ->call(fn($l, $_, $r) => $l - $r)

    ->is('INT')
    ->call(fn($t) => (int) $t->getValue());

$grammar->operators('PLUS', 'MINUS')->left()->prec(1);
$grammar->start('Expr');

// 3. Parse!
$parser = new Parser($grammar);
$result = $parser->parse($lexer->lex('3 + 5 - 2')); // → 6

📖 Documentation

🧪 Testing & Quality

# Run tests
composer test

# Run tests with coverage
composer test-coverage

# Static analysis (PHPStan level 10)
composer phpstan

🙏 Credits

Originally created by @jakubledl, extended by @WalterWoshid, maintained by the GoAOP team.

Give a ⭐ if Dissect saved you from writing a parser by hand!