parsing into private fields

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
cpp
Domain
compilers

Research direction

No source file or test is named. Start with the bp::parse and rule example, then investigate how Spirit.X3 handles attributes and compare the proposed friend-helper and Boost.Describe approaches. Done means an agreed mechanism for parsing into private fields, with its scope and validation covered by tests or documentation.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Currently my biggest gripe with Spirit.X3 is that you can't parse into a class with private fields. This leaves you with two options:

  1. use a proxy type, e.g.

class Myclass_impl {
public:
    char c;
};

class Myclass : private Myclass_impl {
public:
    Myclass_impl &base() { return *this; }
};

bp::rule<struct tag, Myclass_impl> rule{"rule"};
const auto rule_def = bp::char_;
BOOST_PARSER_DEFINE_RULES(rule);

void func() {
std::string str{"c"};
Myclass result;

bp::parse(str, rule, result.base());
}

  1. Just don't use private members, which means your parser is no longer a parser, just a validator.

1. makes public headers unreadable as users would have to look into implementation headers to see the actual class body, while
2. violates the parse, don't validate principle and thus allows for invalidly constructed objects that would never be returned from a successful parse.

Are there any plans to remedy this, e.g. via a Boost.Parser helper class that the user class could befriend, or via a specialization that grants access to the private members (Boost.Describe comes to mind) ?

Or am I just missing a workaround that everyone has been using for the past decade

Dominant language
C++
Stars
182
Forks
28
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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