ebnfcheck

README

ebnfcheck

A simple tool to validate EBNF grammars via the CLI. ✅

Dialects

This tool supports multiple EBNF dialects via the -dialect (or -d) flag. The following built-in dialects are available:

• w3c (default) — the W3C-style EBNF dialect (chosen as the default dialect).
• iso — ISO-style dialect.
• go — the Go golang.org/x/exp/ebnf compatible dialect (useful for compatibility testing).

You can select a dialect when validating a file:

# Use W3C dialect (default)
ebnfcheck -d w3c mygrammar.ebnf

# Use ISO dialect
ebnfcheck -d iso mygrammar.ebnf

# Use Go dialect
ebnfcheck -d go mygrammar.ebnf

Building per-dialect binaries

If you'd like to produce separate downloadable binaries for each dialect (e.g., for distribution), you can build binaries whose default dialect is baked in at link time using -ldflags.

A convenient Makefile is provided with targets:

# build three binaries: ebnfcheck-go, ebnfcheck-iso, ebnfcheck-w3c
make build-all

Or build a single dialect binary:

make build-go
make build-iso
make build-w3c

These binaries will have their default -dialect value set at build time, so running ./ebnfcheck-w3c file.ebnf will use the W3C dialect by default.

Tests & Coverage

Run the test suite with coverage:

go test ./... -coverprofile=coverage
go tool cover -func=coverage
go tool cover -html=coverage -o coverage.html

Extensibility

The registry design allows adding additional dialects later on (for example, enabling dialect-specific comment rules or verification behavior). Contributions welcome.