Simple Parser Example ===================== Extend the ``Doctrine\Common\Lexer\AbstractLexer`` class and implement the ``getCatchablePatterns``, ``getNonCatchablePatterns``, and ``getType`` methods. Here is a very simple example lexer implementation named ``CharacterTypeLexer``. It tokenizes a string to ``T_UPPER``, ``T_LOWER`` and``T_NUMBER`` tokens: .. code-block:: php */ class CharacterTypeLexer extends AbstractLexer { const T_UPPER = 1; const T_LOWER = 2; const T_NUMBER = 3; protected function getCatchablePatterns(): array { return [ '[a-bA-Z0-9]', ]; } protected function getNonCatchablePatterns(): array { return []; } protected function getType(&$value): int { if (is_numeric($value)) { return self::T_NUMBER; } if (strtoupper($value) === $value) { return self::T_UPPER; } if (strtolower($value) === $value) { return self::T_LOWER; } } } Use ``CharacterTypeLexer`` to extract an array of upper case characters: .. code-block:: php */ public function getUpperCaseCharacters(string $string): array { $this->lexer->setInput($string); $this->lexer->moveNext(); $upperCaseChars = []; while (true) { if (!$this->lexer->lookahead) { break; } $this->lexer->moveNext(); if ($this->lexer->token->isA(CharacterTypeLexer::T_UPPER)) { $upperCaseChars[] = $this->lexer->token->value; } } return $upperCaseChars; } } $upperCaseCharacterExtractor = new UpperCaseCharacterExtracter(new CharacterTypeLexer()); $upperCaseCharacters = $upperCaseCharacterExtractor->getUpperCaseCharacters('1aBcdEfgHiJ12'); print_r($upperCaseCharacters); The variable ``$upperCaseCharacters`` contains all of the upper case characters: .. code-block:: php Array ( [0] => B [1] => E [2] => H [3] => J ) This is a simple example but it should demonstrate the low level API that can be used to build more complex parsers.