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 / 17.10)

• Mac OS X (El Capitan 10.11 / Sierra 10.12 / High Sierra 10.13)

• Windows (Server 2012 R2)

Acknowledgement and Citations

picireny is motivated by the idea of Hierarchial Delta Debugging (G. Misherghi, Z. Su: “HDD: Hierarchical delta debugging”, ICSE 2006).

The details of the modernized reimplementation are described in (R. Hodovan, A. Kiss: “Modernizing Hierarchical Delta Debugging.”, A-TEST 2016). Further improvements are published in:

• R. Hodovan, A. Kiss, T. Gyimothy: “Tree Preprocessing and Test Outcome Caching for Efficient Hierarchical Delta Debugging”, AST 2017.

• R. Hodovan, A. Kiss, T. Gyimothy: “Coarse Hierarchical Delta Debugging”, ICSME 2017.

Copyright and Licensing

Licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License.