Skip to main content

Picireny

Hierarchical Delta Debugging Framework

https://badge.fury.io/py/picireny.svg https://travis-ci.org/renatahodovan/picireny.svg?branch=master https://ci.appveyor.com/api/projects/status/jsg8qiflkakbhni1/branch/master?svg=true

Picireny is a Python 3 implementation of the Hierarchical Delta Debugging (HDD in short) algorithm adapted to use ANTLR v4 for parsing both the input and the grammar(s) describing the format of the input. It relies on picire to provide the implementation of the core Delta Debugging algorithm along with various tweaks like parallelization. Just like the picire framework, picireny can also be used either as a command line tool or as a library.

Both Hierarchical Delta Debugging and Delta Debugging automatically reduce “interesting” tests while keeping their “interesting” behaviour. (E.g., “interestingness” may mean failure-inducing input to a system-under-test.) However, HDD is an improvement that tries to investigate less test cases during the reduction process by making use of knowledge on the structure of the input.

The tool (and the algorithm) works iteratively in several ways. As a first step, it splits up the input into tokens and organizes them in a tree structure as defined by a grammar. Then, iteratively, it invokes Delta Debugging on each level of the tree from top to bottom, and DD is an iterative process itself, too. Finally, the nodes kept in the tree are “unparsed” to yield a reduced but still “interesting” output.

Requirements

  • Python >= 3.4

  • pip and setuptools Python packages (the latter is automatically installed by pip).

  • ANTLR v4

  • Java SE >= 7 JRE or JDK (the latter is optional, only needed if Java is used as the parser language)

Install

The quick way:

pip install picireny

Alternatively, by cloning the project and running setuptools:

python setup.py install

Usage

picireny uses the same CLI as picire and hence accepts the same options. On top of the inherited ones, picireny accepts several further arguments:

  • --grammar (optional): List of grammars describing the input format. (You can write them by hand or simply download them from the ANTLR v4 grammars repository.)

  • --start (optional): Name of the start rule (optionally prefixed with a grammar name) as [grammarname:]rulename.

  • --replacements (optional): Json file containing rule names and minimal replacement strings (otherwise these are calculated automatically) (see schema).

  • --format (optional): Json file describing the input format (see schema and example). This descriptor can incorporate all the above (--grammar, --start and --replacements) properties, along with the possibility of island grammar definitions. If both --format and the aforementioned arguments are present, then the latter will override the appropriate values of the format file.

  • --antlr (optional): Path to the ANTLR tool jar.

  • --parser (optional): Language of the generated parser. Currently ‘python’ (default) and ‘java’ targets (faster, but needs JDK) are supported.

Note: although, all the arguments are optional, the grammar files and the start rule of the top-level parser must be defined with an arbitrary combination of the --format, --grammars, and --start arguments.

Example usage to reduce an HTML file:

picireny --input=<path/to/the/input.html> --test=<path/to/the/tester> \
         --grammar "HTMLLexer.g4 HTMLParser.g4" --start htmlDocument \
         --parallel --subset-iterator=skip --complement-iterator=backward

Compatibility

picireny was tested on:

  • Linux (Ubuntu 14.04 / 15.10 / 16.04)

  • Mac OS X (El Capitan 10.11 / Sierra 10.12)

  • Windows (Server 2012 R2)

Metadata

Release files for picireny 17.10

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for picireny 17.10
File Size Uploaded
picireny-17.10.tar.gz 36.3 kB Details

Release files / picireny-17.10.tar.gz

Download URL picireny-17.10.tar.gz
Size 36.3 kB
Tags Source
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
11523eb1b43124afd538063c23b1f59f0d3748d823bfb0d2df6f094f6282b2bd
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
790a34a0398d5738d0b1126e745c5f439ea83be6709419b20ec35a5f0cb63ee8
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
No

Release history Release notifications | RSS feed

21.8

2 release files

21.3

1 release file

19.3

1 release file

18.10

1 release file

18.2

1 release file

This release

17.10 This release

1 release file

17.7

1 release file

17.1

1 release file

16.12

1 release file

Anthropic, PBC Visionary sponsor Bloomberg Visionary sponsor Hudson River Trading Visionary sponsor Meta Visionary sponsor NVIDIA Visionary sponsor Microsoft Sustainability sponsor Depot Continuous Integration AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Monitoring Fastly CDN Google Download Analytics Sentry Error logging StatusPage Status page