A general purpose macro processor

David N. Gray <dgray@acm.org>

March 17, 1995
Revised May 21 and August 20, 1995
Revised November 30, 2003

1 Introduction   toc next

This document is the user manual for gema, a program whose name stands for general purpose macro processor. This is a utility program which is run as a shell command under Unix or MS-DOS and can be used for performing conversions or translations of data files or extracting information from files.

The man page for gema provides a tutorial introduction and a brief reference summary, while this document provides a more detailed specification. It would probably be best to read the tutorial section first before reading the rest of this document. The command line options are fully documented in the man page, so will not be repeated here.

This version of the document corresponds to version 1.2 of the program. (Note that the -version option can be used to check which version you are running.)

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2 Operational Overview   prev toc next

The general model of operation is that the program reads an input file and writes an output file which consists of the input data transformed in accordance with a set of transformation rules provided by the user. A rule consists of a template and an action. The template is a pattern which the program will attempt to match with the input data. Any input text that matches a template pattern will be replaced by the result of evaluating the rule's action. There may be multiple sets of rules, where each set of rules is called a domain. At any given time, translation is controlled by the rules of one particular domain, but both templates and actions are able to switch to a different domain for processing particular portions of the data. A domain can inherit from another domain, meaning that if no match is found for the current input text in any of the rules for the current domain, then the rules of the inherited domain will be tried.

Processing of a file begins using the default domain, whose name is the empty string. First, if there is a rule with template ``\B'' (beginning of file) or ``\A'' (beginning of data), then its action is performed. Then the program begins reading the file. For each character position in the file, the program attempts to find a rule in the current domain whose template pattern matches the input text beginning at that point. If a match is found, then the input stream is advanced to the end of the matched text and the rule's action is executed. When no template matches the current position, the current character is copied to the output file (unless the -match option is being used), the input stream is advanced to the next character, and it tries to find a template matching the text starting at that position. When the end of the input file is reached, if there are any rules with template ``\E'' (end of file) or ``\Z'' (end of data), their actions will be executed, and then the files will be closed.

However, if a template matches without advancing the input stream (for example, if it begins with ``\P''), then after executing its action, the search continues as though it had not matched. This is necessary to avoid hanging in a loop repeating the same match forever.

A rule may have an empty action, with the effect that the matching text is simply discarded. In each domain there may be at most one rule with an empty template, which signifies a default action to be taken when no other rule matches. However, since an empty template does not cause the input stream to be advanced and there are no more rules to try, this is only meaningful if the corresponding action exits the current context by using one of @end, @terminate, @fail, or @abort.

Generally speaking, while looking for a match, the rules within a domain will conceptually be tried in the same order in which they were defined, so wherever there might be ambiguities, the user should define the rules for preferred special cases before the rules for default general cases. However, there are some important exceptions:

• Rules beginning with a literal character (including space or ``\S'') will be tried before rules beginning with an argument. (Operators that don't advance the input stream, such as ``\N'', ``\I'', or ``\L'', are ignored for the purpose of this determination.) The way this actually works is that the current input character is used as an array index to find the list of rules beginning with that character. If none are found, or none match, then the rules beginning with arguments are tried in sequence.

• If two rules begin with the same sequence of literal characters, the one with the longer literal string will be tried first. This is because if this were not done, a more specific rule appearing later would never match, which would surely not be what the user intended.

• If two rules have identical templates, the second rule will replace the first on the assumption that it is a redefinition.[Footnote 1]

Rules can be defined either as arguments of the -p command line option or in pattern files loaded by the -f option. Each line in a pattern file can be one of the following:

• A comment line, indicated by a ``!'' in the first column.
• Any blank lines are ignored.
• An immediate action - a line beginning with ``@'' can contain one or more function calls which will be evaluated immediately before reading the next line. Normally these should be functions that are used for their side effects and do not return a value. The most common case is using ``@set'' to initialize a variable.
• Any other line is expected to be a rule, which should contain a ``='' separating the template and action. A line may contain multiple rules, separated by semicolons. A rule may be continued on another line by ending the line with a backslash, which causes the following newline to be ignored and skips over any leading spaces on the following line.

  Rules may be preceded by a domain name followed by a colon, which causes all of the rules following on the same line to be defined in the designated domain. The domain name may optionally be enclosed in angle brackets, and any leading or trailing blanks will be ignored. If the domain is to be referenced in an action following ``@'', then the name should be limited to letters, digits, hyphen, and underscore.

• A line of the form ``name1::name2'' specifies that the domain named on the left inherits from the domain named on the right. Each domain can inherit from at most one other, but multiple levels of inheritance is allowed.

A template may contain any of the following:

• Literal characters, which are to be exactly matched. Literal characters include letters, digits, special characters quoted by a backslash, control characters designated by backslash followed by a lower case letter or digit, control characters designated by ``^'' followed by a letter, and any other characters that don't have any special meaning. Any of the 256 possible characters can be used.
• Arguments, which match some variable portion of text, and remember the matched text so that it can be referenced later. There are several different kinds of arguments, which are denoted by ``*'', ``?'', ``#'', ``<...>''. and ``/.../''. The current implementation allows a template to have a maximum of twenty arguments.
• Template operators, denoted by a backslash followed by an upper case letter, or by the space character. These may set local options, impose additional requirements for a match, or allow skipping of redundant spaces in the input.
• A dollar sign may be used followed by a single letter or digit to insert the value of a variable or a previous argument into the text that is to be matched. (This does not currently work for ``*'' arguments.)

An action may contain any of the following:

• Literal characters, which when evaluated simply copy themselves to the output stream.
• The value of a template argument can be output by using a dollar sign followed by the argument number (enclosed in braces if more than one digit), or by using the characters ``*'', ``?'', or ``#'' to denote the corresponding argument.
• The notation ``${name}'' can be used to output the value of a variable.
• The notation ``@name{args}'' can be used to call a built-in function or to translate the argument with a user-defined domain.
• Some of the operators denoted by a space or backslash followed by an upper case letter also apply in actions, typically for conditional output of spaces or newlines.

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Footnotes

Footnote 1:
This policy was adopted before @undef had been invented; it might be better to warn about duplicates and require explicit undefinition before redefining. (back)