Requirements

• Python ~= 2.7 or >= 3.5

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

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

Install

The quick way (to install the latest official release):

pip install picireny

Or clone the project and run setuptools (to install the freshest development revision):

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 / 16.04 / 18.04)

• Mac OS X (El Capitan 10.11 / Sierra 10.12 / High Sierra 10.13 / Mojave 10.14 / Catalina 10.15)

• Windows (Server 2012 R2 / Server version 1809 / Windows 10)

Acknowledgement and Citations

Picireny is motivated by the idea of Hierarchical Delta Debugging:

• Ghassan Misherghi and Zhendong Su. HDD: Hierarchical Delta Debugging. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE ‘06), pages 142-151, Shanghai, China, May 2006. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/1134285.1134307

The details of the modernized re-implementation and further improvements are published in:

• Renata Hodovan and Akos Kiss. Modernizing Hierarchical Delta Debugging. In Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Automating Test Case Design, Selection, and Evaluation (A-TEST 2016), pages 31-37, Seattle, Washington, USA, November 2016. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2994291.2994296

• Renata Hodovan, Akos Kiss, and Tibor Gyimothy. Tree Preprocessing and Test Outcome Caching for Efficient Hierarchical Delta Debugging. In Proceedings of the 12th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Automation of Software Testing (AST 2017), pages 23-29, Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 2017. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/AST.2017.4

• Renata Hodovan, Akos Kiss, and Tibor Gyimothy. Coarse Hierarchical Delta Debugging. In Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2017), pages 194-203, Shanghai, China, September 2017. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2017.26

• Akos Kiss, Renata Hodovan, and Tibor Gyimothy. HDDr: A Recursive Variant of the Hierarchical Delta Debugging Algorithm. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on Automating Test Case Design, Selection, and Evaluation (A-TEST 2018), pages 16-22, Lake Buena Vista, Florida, USA, November 2018. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3278186.3278189

Copyright and Licensing

Licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License.