Parsing tools

[kevinushey]

I added a couple of R level tools in utils.R, but those that search for characters are surely too slow. They could be written in C for efficiency.

FWIW, I find it's much easier to parse files as one big string with newlines embedded, rather than per line, so some of them are implemented with that expectation.

[romainfrancois]

that's probably something we can do in C++ indeed. Maybe borrow from @jjallaire parsing code in Rcpp.

[romainfrancois]

I'm borrowing a few lines of code from @jjallaire in the parse_cpp_function function:

With this file:

#include <Rcpp.h>
using namespace Rcpp ;

// [[Rcpp::export]]
int foo(int a, 
    int b = 22
    ){
  return 2 ;
}

I get:

> txt <- readLines( "/tmp/foo.cpp" )
> sign <- .Call( "parse_cpp_function", txt, 5L )
> sign
$name
[1] "foo"

$return_type
[1] "int"

$arguments
$arguments$a
   type default
  "int"      NA

$arguments$b
   type default
  "int"    "22"

Should get us started.