Yenie Parser

Yenie Parser is a Python package for parsing Cisco CLI command output into structured dictionaries without importing the full Cisco Genie/pyATS stack.

The parser set covers command templates adapted from Cisco Genie parser files. Results use Genie-compatible dictionary shapes where the upstream parser defines them.

Install

This package is intended to work with normal Python packaging tools once published:

pip install yenie-parser

Usage

Python API

import yenie_parser

parsed = yenie_parser.parse(
    platform="iosxe",
    command="show device-tracking database",
    raw_output=raw_cli_output,
)

Currently, parser supports these platforms:

• iosxe

The parser accepts only raw command output. It does not connect to devices or execute commands.

By default, parse(...) returns None when parsing fails. That includes unsupported platforms, unsupported commands, ambiguous command matches, parser execution failures, and raw output that matches a command but produces no structured data.

Failure behavior can be adjusted for strict validation, warnings, or legacy fallback values:

parsed = yenie_parser.parse(
    platform="iosxe",
    command="show device-tracking database",
    raw_output=raw_cli_output,
    strict=False,
    warn=False,
    on_failure="none",
)

Supported on_failure values are:

• "none": return None on failure. This is the default.
• "empty_dict": return {} on failure for legacy callers.
• "raw_output": return the original raw_output string on failure.

When strict=True, parse failures raise Yenie Parser exceptions instead of returning the configured on_failure value. When warn=True, parse failures emit a standard-library warning using YenieParserWarning.

Command matching strips extra whitespace and is case-insensitive. It does not rewrite Cisco command tokens, so device-tracking and device tracking are different commands.

Available command templates can be inspected with:

commands = yenie_parser.supported_commands("iosxe")

Parser registry and command-match metadata are cached after first use. To move that first-use work out of a timed collection path, preload parser metadata before parsing:

yenie_parser.preload(
    platform="iosxe",
    commands=[
        "show interfaces status",
        "show cdp neighbors detail",
        "show mac address-table",
    ],
)

Calling yenie_parser.preload() without commands (or platform) warms all supported IOS-XE command templates. If you are developing parser modules in a long-lived Python process, clear those caches with:

yenie_parser.clear_caches()

CLI

The installed package provides a yenie-parser terminal command:

yenie-parser parse \
  --platform iosxe \
  --command "show device-tracking database" \
  --raw-output "Binding Table has 1 entries, 0 dynamic (limit 200000)"

Multiline command output can also be read from a file or stdin:

yenie-parser parse -p iosxe -c "show device-tracking database" --raw-file output.txt
cat output.txt | yenie-parser parse -p iosxe -c "show device-tracking database"

Parser failure behavior mirrors the Python API:

yenie-parser parse \
  -p iosxe \
  -c "show device-tracking database" \
  --raw-file output.txt \
  --strict \
  --warn \
  --on-failure none

Supported parser templates can be listed or searched:

yenie-parser list
yenie-parser list "authentication s"
yenie-parser list --search "authentication s"
yenie-parser list --command "show authentication sessions"

Package metadata is available with:

yenie-parser --version

Attribution

Parser behavior is derived from the Apache-2.0 licensed Cisco Genie parser project:

• Repository: https://github.com/CiscoTestAutomation/genieparser
• Source paths:
  • src/genie/libs/parser/iosxe/show_device_tracking.py
  • src/genie/libs/parser/iosxe/show_authentication_sessions.py
  • src/genie/libs/parser/iosxe/show_inventory.py
  • src/genie/libs/parser/iosxe/show_cdp.py
  • src/genie/libs/parser/iosxe/show_arp.py
  • src/genie/libs/parser/iosxe/show_fdb.py
  • src/genie/libs/parser/iosxe/show_interface.py
  • src/genie/libs/parser/iosxe/show_run.py
  • src/genie/libs/parser/iosxe/show_routing.py
  • src/genie/libs/parser/iosxe/show_aaa.py
  • src/genie/libs/parser/iosxe/show_cts.py
  • src/genie/libs/parser/iosxe/show_platform.py

See docs/conversions/ for conversion metadata.