On the PHP::Impact blog today Federico points out a few HTML DOM parsers that work similar to jQuery:

• the Simple HTML DOM Parser
• Zend_Dom_Query
• phpQuery

Check out a previous tutorial of his for more information on using DOM parsers to scrape information from remote sites.

Skaldrom passed along a link to an article he's written up to show how to use one of the more powerful PEAR packages in a simple "Hello World" kind of script - the PHP_LexerGenerator and PHP_ParserGenerator packages.

Who doesn't dream about it: Your own programming language, because the syntax and the word are expression! A step continue to go to ascend and from the programming language user to the language creator! This is now possible in PHP, but unfortunately only with minimum documentation.

He provides an example of the Lexer/Generator in action - handling a simple mathematical operation. The execution code is first with the Lexer definition file and the code for the parser following. Lastly, he has included the code to make things work - passing the test string into his custom Lexer which is passed off to the Parser and a value returned.

David Coallier has a quick hit post today on his blog. In it, he shows how, with a little bit of SimpleXML magic, to parse the log files from your Subversion installation.

Yesterday I was struggling trying to get svn log to display the results for a certain user and this was very annoying.. then I jumped on #svn on freenode, and someone mentionned svn log --xml

This apparently made my life much much easier with this simple script I have pulled in a couple minutes.

He includes the script and a brief set of instructions on how to use it in your installation.

On Pàdraic Brady's blog, he talks about some thought he had on a YAML component for the Zend Framework and some of the feedback he's gotten so far.

Since I'm used to the format from Ruby and Perl and since it's used for a similar purpose in the PHP Symfony framework, I also suggested using YAML configuration files since they are far more readable than XML and remain machine readable. I believe this went over quite well. Later on I realised the Zend Framework has no YAML support, and after some searching noticed the only (apparent) PHP parser was the Spyc library

So I fired off a few emails to the fw-general mailing list of the Zend Framework to see if there was any interest. I'd like to thank Matthew and Gavin for their feedback and I've since decided to have a go at implementing a YAML parser in PHP.

He notes that there is already a YAML parser for PHP5 (Syck), but that creating one for the Zend Framework is a different animal. He finishes up the post talking about where to start with the parser, what it is, and the next steps for him in its development.

When finding he was in need of a parser and lexer, Wez Furlong decided to work up one that was PHP-based and a take off of the popular lemon parser and JLex lexer.

From time to time, I find that I need to put a parser together. Most of the time I find that I need to do this in C for performance, but other times I just want something convenient, like PHP, and have been out of luck.

His result is two new packages - lemon-php and JLexPHP (under a BSDish license) you can download and compile on your own system.

Also, if you'll remember a while back, Greg Beaver had wanted something similar (as mentioned in the comments) and created his own lexer/generator as well.

Greg Beaver has blogged today with more about the port he's been wokring on of the Lemon parser generator to PHP5, this time discussion the creation of two packages - PHP_ParserGenerator and PHP_LexerGenerator.

Last week, I blogged about completing a port of the Lemon parser generator to PHP 5, which I thought was pretty cool. However, in an email, Alex Merz pointed out that without a lexer generator to accompany lemon, it's pretty difficult to write a decent parser.

After Alex's email, I started thinking about what it would take to write a lexer generator. Basically, a lexer generator requires parsing and compiling regular expressions, then scanning the source one character at a time to find matches. So, it occurred to me that perhaps simply combining regular expressions with sub-patterns could accomplish this task quite easily.

He goes on to explain this process, showing how a simple regular expresion call (and a look at its return arguments) could create a simple, easy solution. Since the re2c format is still unsupported in PHP (without a goto to go to), he opts to stick with the regular expressions and creates a "lex2php" format instead.

He's packaged up both halves of this setup and has already posted proposals for them to the PEAR site:

• PHP_LexerGenerator
• PHP_ParserGenerator

Greg Beaver has a new post today with mentions of a few things, but mainly the work that he's done to create a parser generator in PHP.

About three weeks ago, I looked at the state of the parser generator world out there for PHP, and it is pretty dismal. Antlr3 will theoretically support PHP 5 generation, but it's impossible to find any source in spite of several fruitless hours of googling.

I finally decided that if this is ever going to happen, I'll have to get off my butt and do it. So, two weeks ago, I grabbed the source of the Lemon parser generator from its website

He follows the path he took, using the code from the Lemon parser, translating it into a PHP version, and correcting a few bugs along the way.

In the process, I have a fully working PGN file parser that will make its way into a PEAR proposal as soon as I get around to integrating it with Games_Chess to do full validation of the contents of the PGN file. However, the parser works 100% even with some of the weirdest PGN things I could throw at it.

He finishes off the post with some example code, including a method for using it on the command line. You can grab the code for the project and related files here

Sebastian Bergmann also comments in his blog about the work Greg's done.

On the SitePoint PHP Blog today, there's a new post from Harry Fuecks talking about J4P5, a native PHP5 Javascript interpreter.

I kid you not. In fact this looks like a pretty serious attempt. You'll need to download and run yourself. There's grammar rules for Javascript in there and a Javascript runtime written in PHP. It passes the "it works" test'"the examples run straight out of $ unzip. Looking at what it does and the TODO list, aside from the Unicode issue strikes me J4P5 is already more than 50% of the way there.

Aside from novelty, one real world use might be an extension to SimpleTest's web testing capabilities. With a little work there's also potential to create an awesome Javascript source compressor'"the lexing patterns are all there.

He also mentions another project, metaphp, that builds a "higher level langauge" on top of PHP. The parser for it was used in the J4P5 project mentioned above...