Question

I would like to be able to parse some Tcl code where arguments are not surrounded by strings.

Consider this tcl code:

proc foo {name} {
  puts "Foo --> $name"
}    

foo bar

For those unfamiliar with Tcl, foo is the method name and bar is the argument (quotes are optional in Tcl).

The previous code will output:

Foo --> bar

Is it possible to parse exactly the same input using ruby (bar remains unquoted)?

The equivalent ruby code is:

def foo(name)
  puts "Foo --> #{name}"
end

tcl = <<-TCL.gsub(/^\s+/, "").chop
  foo bar
TCL
instance_eval(tcl)

Of course that fails when it reaches bar since it’s expected it to be quoted.

I’ve tried tinkering with method_missing

def method_missing(meth, *args)
    puts meth.to_s + " --> args.to_s
end

but it parses in reverse order:

to_hash --> []
bar --> []
foo --> [nil]

Does anyone have a clean solution to this type of problem. I’d like to avoid tokenizing the strings since reading the data in by calling a method requires minimal work compared to lexical analysis. But if I’m trying to do something that’s not possible, I’d like to know. Thanks.

Answer 1

It’s doesn’t work for you because .puts method returns nil instead of string:

irb(main):003:0> puts "42"
42
=> nil

I really don’t know why to_hash appears in this method_missing but it works:

def foo(name)
  puts "Foo --> #{name}"
end

def method_missing(meth, *args)
     meth.to_s unless meth.to_s  == "to_hash"
end

tcl = <<-TCL.gsub(/^\s+/, "").chop
  foo bar
TCL

instance_eval(tcl)

=> Foo --> bar