Question

I am working on a Parsing logic that needs to take operator precedence into consideration. My needs are not too complex. To start with I need multiplication and division to take higher precedence than addition and subtraction.

For example: 1 + 2 * 3 should be treated as 1 + (2 * 3). This is a simple example but you get the point!

[There are couple more custom tokens that I need to add to the precedence logic, which I may be able to add based on the suggestions I receive here.]

Here is one example of dealing with operator precedence: http://jim-mcbeath.blogspot.com/2008/09/scala-parser-combinators.html#precedencerevisited.

Are there any other ideas?

Answer 1

This is a bit simpler that Jim McBeath’s example, but it does what you say you need, i.e. correct arithmetic precdedence, and also allows for parentheses. I adapted the example from Programming in Scala to get it to actually do the calculation and provide the answer.

It should be quite self-explanatory. There is a heirarchy formed by saying an expr consists of terms interspersed with operators, terms consist of factors with operators, and factors are floating point numbers or expressions in parentheses.

import scala.util.parsing.combinator.JavaTokenParsers

class Arith extends JavaTokenParsers {

  type D = Double

  def expr:   Parser[D]    = term ~ rep(plus | minus)     ^^ {case a~b => (a /: b)((acc,f) => f(acc))} 
  def plus:   Parser[D=>D] = "+" ~ term                   ^^ {case "+"~b => _ + b}
  def minus:  Parser[D=>D] = "-" ~ term                   ^^ {case "-"~b => _ - b}
  def term:   Parser[D]    = factor ~ rep(times | divide) ^^ {case a~b => (a /: b)((acc,f) => f(acc))}
  def times:  Parser[D=>D] = "*" ~ factor                 ^^ {case "*"~b => _ * b }
  def divide: Parser[D=>D] = "/" ~ factor                 ^^ {case "/"~b => _ / b} 
  def factor: Parser[D]    = fpn | "(" ~> expr <~ ")" 
  def fpn:    Parser[D]    = floatingPointNumber          ^^ (_.toDouble)

}

object Main extends Arith with App {
  val input = "(1 + 2 * 3 + 9) * 2 + 1"
  println(parseAll(expr, input).get) // prints 33.0
}