Yaml.Parser

AdaYaml’s parser has a quite simple interface. Basically, you call one of the Set_Input procedures to tell the parser where to read the YAML character stream from and then start querying events with Next.

Sources

Input can be either a String or a polymorphic Yaml.Source.Instance'Class. AdaYaml provides two implementations for sources:

• Yaml.Source.File.Instance can read any non-special files from the file system, i.e. files for which the size of the content can be queried via Ada.Directiories. Use this implementation whenever possible, it is the faster one.
• Yaml.Source.Text_IO.Instance for reading any Ada.Text_IO.File_Type. Use this only when necessary, e.g. for reading standard input or a special file like /dev/urandom.

You can provide an own implementation of Yaml.Source.Instance for sources not covered by AdaYaml, e.g. a network stream.

Querying Events

Parsing is lazy. The next event is typically only parsed from the input when you query it. This means that if the input contains any syntax errors, Next will only raise an exception after all parseable events in front of the syntax error have been yielded.

By convention, the parser has finished after it emits a Stream_End token. Subsequent calls to Next will always yield another Stream_End token.

Error Handling

A call to Next can typically yield two exceptions:

• Lexer_Error is raised when an error in the lexical structure of the input has been discovered. The raised exception always has a message attached that explains what went wrong. If you want to display the error to the user after catching it, you may use Current_Lexer_Token_Start and Current_Input_Character to query the start and end position of the current entity the lexer failed to tokenize.
• Parser_Error is raised when an error in the syntactical structure of the input has been discovered, and is also accompanied by an error message. You can query the current lexical token which caused the error by calling Recent_Lexer_Token_Start and Recent_Lexer_Token_End.

In addition, standard Ada exceptions that can be raised are:

• Storage_Error when running out of memory. This can occur since creating text content values for the event may cause a memory allocation.
• Any error which originates from the source implementation. For example, the I/O exceptions from Ada.Text_IO may be raised when parsing from a Yaml.Source.Text_IO.Instance.