What is a good parser generator for php?

Question

I need to parse a small \'mini language\' which users can type on my site. I was wondering what the counterparts of lex and jacc or antlr are for the world of php.

Answer 1

I used LIME Parser generator for PHP a couple of years ago, and it was already mature and stable.

The parser generator itself is written in PHP, which doesn't really matter in any technical sense - as we require only that the generated parser be in PHP - but I like this detail nonetheless. It makes me feel less apologetic about writing software in PHP ;-)

EDIT:

I should add:

1. Where I wrote "used" it would be more accurate to say that I "played with". I haven't written any production code using lime, yet. But I see no reason not to do so.

2. The "calculator example" provided with lime uses a tokenize() method which is very far from a real substitute for the power of lex. But if you need a real tokenizer it ought to be possible to use lex on the "front end" to feed tokens to lime on the "back end".