EBNF 2 RailRoad

A command line tool to create great documentation including railroad diagrams based on the ISO/IEC 14977 specification

Features

• Creates optimized visual syntax diagrams based on the EBNF syntax
• Quick navigation using references of used declarations
• Nice comment markup using markdown
• Validates if document is complete and has no duplicate declarations
• Shows pretty printed text syntax in the document
• Pretty printing of the sourcefile
• Table of contents indicating root elements, character sets, common elements and recursion
• Generation of large overview diagrams for root elements

Installation

npm install -g ebnf2railroad

Usage from command line

Usage: ebnf2railroad [options] <file>

Converts an ISO/IEC 14977 EBNF file to a HTML/Markdown file with SVG railroad diagrams

Options:

  -V, --version          output the version number
  -q, --quiet            suppress output to STDOUT
  -o, --target [target]  output the file to target destination.
  --no-target            skip writing output HTML
  -t, --title [title]    title to use for HTML document
  --lint                 exit with status code 2 if EBNF document has warnings
  --write-style          rewrites the source document with styled text
  --no-optimizations     does not try to optimize the diagrams
  --no-overview-diagram  skip creating overview diagrams for root elements
  --no-diagram-wrap      does not wrap diagrams for width minimization
  --no-text-formatting   does not format the output text version (becomes single line)
  --dump-ast             dump EBNF file AST to target destination for further processing
  --read-ast             input file is in the AST format
  -h, --help             output usage information

Examples

To generate HTML documentation of the EBNF file:

ebnf2railroad --title 'My Title' inputfile.ebnf -o outputfile.html

To only verify the EBNF file:

ebnf2railroad --lint inputfile.ebnf --no-target

To prettify the source EBNF file:

ebnf2railroad --write-style inputfile.ebnf --no-target

Online examples

Check the examples folder for an example input file and the generated result page.

• EBNF ebnf2railroad examples/ebnf.ebnf --title EBNF View html result online View source
• JSON ebnf2railroad examples/json.ebnf --title JSON View html result online View source

Optimizations

The following optimizations are applied:

• Ungrouping of groups that do not affect meaning of syntax
• Untangling of nested choice elements
• Duplicate choices are removed
• Pretty printing of original syntax, with wrapping, column alignment

View html result online View source View markdown result

Usage as module

const { parseEbnf, createDocumentation } = require("ebnf2railroad");

const ebnf = "definition = 'a', other, { other } | item, 'b';";
const ast = parseEbnf(ebnf); // can throw parse error exceptions
const htmlOutput = createDocumentation(ast);

Licence

The code is licensed under MIT (see LICENSE file).

Contributing

Thanks for your interest in contributing! There are many ways to contribute to this project. Get started here

Acknowledgements

• All SVG railroad diagrams are generated through: https://github.com/tabatkins/railroad-diagrams
• All UTF railroad diagrams are generated through: https://github.com/matthijsgroen/utf-railroad
• The EBNF parser is generated by http://zaa.ch/jison/
• All markdown is parsed with http://showdownjs.com/