This document is obsolete. Please
refer to RFC 4234.
Network Working Group D. Crocker, Ed. Request for Comments: 2234 Internet Mail Consortium Category: Standards Track P. Overell Demon Internet Ltd. November 1997
Augmented BNF for Syntax Specifications: ABNF
Status of this Memo
This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1997). All Rights Reserved.
Internet technical specifications often need to define a format syntax and are free to employ whatever notation their authors deem useful. Over the years, a modified version of Backus-Naur Form (BNF), called Augmented BNF (ABNF), has been popular among many Internet specifications. It balances compactness and simplicity, with reasonable representational power. In the early days of the Arpanet, each specification contained its own definition of ABNF. This included the email specifications, RFC733 and then RFC822 which have come to be the common citations for defining ABNF. The current document separates out that definition, to permit selective reference. Predictably, it also provides some modifications and enhancements.
The differences between standard BNF and ABNF involve naming rules, repetition, alternatives, order-independence, and value ranges. Appendix A (Core) supplies rule definitions and encoding for a core lexical analyzer of the type common to several Internet specifications. It is provided as a convenience and is otherwise separate from the meta language defined in the body of this document, and separate from its formal status.
The name of a rule is simply the name itself; that is, a sequence of characters, beginning with an alphabetic character, and followed by a combination of alphabetics, digits and hyphens (dashes).
NOTE: Rule names are case-insensitive
The names <rulename>, <Rulename>, <RULENAME> and <rUlENamE> all refer to the same rule.
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Unlike original BNF, angle brackets ("<", ">") are not required. However, angle brackets may be used around a rule name whenever their presence will facilitate discerning the use of a rule name. This is typically restricted to rule name references in free-form prose, or to distinguish partial rules that combine into a string not separated by white space, such as shown in the discussion about repetition, below.
where <name> is the name of the rule, <elements> is one or more rule names or terminal specifications and <crlf> is the end-of- line indicator, carriage return followed by line feed. The equal sign separates the name from the definition of the rule. The elements form a sequence of one or more rule names and/or value definitions, combined according to the various operators, defined in this document, such as alternative and repetition.
For visual ease, rule definitions are left aligned. When a rule requires multiple lines, the continuation lines are indented. The left alignment and indentation are relative to the first lines of the ABNF rules and need not match the left margin of the document.
Rules resolve into a string of terminal values, sometimes called characters. In ABNF a character is merely a non-negative integer. In certain contexts a specific mapping (encoding) of values into a character set (such as ASCII) will be specified.
Terminals are specified by one or more numeric characters with the base interpretation of those characters indicated explicitly. The following bases are currently defined:
b = binary
d = decimal
x = hexadecimal
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Hence:
CR = %d13
CR = %x0D
respectively specify the decimal and hexadecimal representation of [US-ASCII] for carriage return.
A concatenated string of such values is specified compactly, using a period (".") to indicate separation of characters within that value. Hence:
CRLF = %d13.10
ABNF permits specifying literal text string directly, enclosed in quotation-marks. Hence:
command = "command string"
Literal text strings are interpreted as a concatenated set of printable characters.
NOTE: ABNF strings are case-insensitive and the character set for these strings is us-ascii.
Hence:
rulename = "abc"
and:
rulename = "aBc"
will match "abc", "Abc", "aBc", "abC", "ABc", "aBC", "AbC" and "ABC".
To specify a rule which IS case SENSITIVE, specify the characters individually.
For example:
rulename = %d97 %d98 %d99
or
rulename = %d97.98.99
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will match only the string which comprises only lowercased characters, abc.
External representations of terminal value characters will vary according to constraints in the storage or transmission environment. Hence, the same ABNF-based grammar may have multiple external encodings, such as one for a 7-bit US-ASCII environment, another for a binary octet environment and still a different one when 16-bit Unicode is used. Encoding details are beyond the scope of ABNF, although Appendix A (Core) provides definitions for a 7-bit US-ASCII environment as has been common to much of the Internet.
By separating external encoding from the syntax, it is intended that alternate encoding environments can be used for the same syntax.
A rule can define a simple, ordered string of values -- i.e., a concatenation of contiguous characters -- by listing a sequence of rule names. For example:
foo = %x61 ; a
bar = %x62 ; b
mumble = foo bar foo
So that the rule <mumble> matches the lowercase string "aba".
LINEAR WHITE SPACE: Concatenation is at the core of the ABNF parsing model. A string of contiguous characters (values) is parsed according to the rules defined in ABNF. For Internet specifications, there is some history of permitting linear white space (space and horizontal tab) to be freelyPand implicitlyPinterspersed around major constructs, such as delimiting special characters or atomic strings.
NOTE: This specification for ABNF does not provide for implicit specification of linear white space.
Any grammar which wishes to permit linear white space around delimiters or string segments must specify it explicitly. It is often useful to provide for such white space in "core" rules that are
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then used variously among higher-level rules. The "core" rules might be formed into a lexical analyzer or simply be part of the main ruleset.
Elements separated by forward slash ("/") are alternatives. Therefore,
foo / bar
will accept <foo> or <bar>.
NOTE: A quoted string containing alphabetic characters is special form for specifying alternative characters and is interpreted as a non-terminal representing the set of combinatorial strings with the contained characters, in the specified order but with any mixture of upper and lower case..
It is sometimes convenient to specify a list of alternatives in fragments. That is, an initial rule may match one or more alternatives, with later rule definitions adding to the set of alternatives. This is particularly useful for otherwise- independent specifications which derive from the same parent rule set, such as often occurs with parameter lists. ABNF permits this incremental definition through the construct:
oldrule =/ additional-alternatives
So that the rule set
ruleset = alt1 / alt2
ruleset =/ alt3
ruleset =/ alt4 / alt5
is the same as specifying
ruleset = alt1 / alt2 / alt3 / alt4 / alt5
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A range of alternative numeric values can be specified compactly, using dash ("-") to indicate the range of alternative values. Hence:
DIGIT = %x30-39
is equivalent to:
DIGIT = "0" / "1" / "2" / "3" / "4" / "5" / "6" /
"7" / "8" / "9"
Concatenated numeric values and numeric value ranges can not be specified in the same string. A numeric value may use the dotted notation for concatenation or it may use the dash notation to specify one value range. Hence, to specify one printable character, between end of line sequences, the specification could be:
Elements enclosed in parentheses are treated as a single element, whose contents are STRICTLY ORDERED. Thus,
elem (foo / bar) blat
which matches (elem foo blat) or (elem bar blat).
elem foo / bar blat
matches (elem foo) or (bar blat).
NOTE: It is strongly advised to use grouping notation, rather than to rely on proper reading of "bare" alternations, when alternatives consist of multiple rule names or literals.
Hence it is recommended that instead of the above form, the form:
(elem foo) / (bar blat)
be used. It will avoid misinterpretation by casual readers.
The sequence group notation is also used within free text to set off an element sequence from the prose.
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The operator "*" preceding an element indicates repetition. The full form is:
<a>*<b>element
where <a> and <b> are optional decimal values, indicating at least <a> and at most <b> occurrences of element.
Default values are 0 and infinity so that *<element> allows any number, including zero; 1*<element> requires at least one; 3*3<element> allows exactly 3 and 1*2<element> allows one or two.
Externally, data are represented as "network virtual ASCII", namely 7-bit US-ASCII in an 8-bit field, with the high (8th) bit set to zero. A string of values is in "network byte order" with the higher-valued bytes represented on the left-hand side and being sent over the network first.
The syntax for ABNF was originally specified in RFC 733. Ken L. Harrenstien, of SRI International, was responsible for re-coding the BNF into an augmented BNF that makes the representation smaller and easier to understand.
This recent project began as a simple effort to cull out the portion of RFC 822 which has been repeatedly cited by non-email specification writers, namely the description of augmented BNF. Rather than simply and blindly converting the existing text into a separate document, the working group chose to give careful consideration to the deficiencies, as well as benefits, of the existing specification and related specifications available over the last 15 years and therefore to pursue enhancement. This turned the project into something rather more ambitious than first intended. Interestingly the result is not massively different from that original, although decisions such as removing the list notation came as a surprise.
The current round of specification was part of the DRUMS working group, with significant contributions from Jerome Abela , Harald Alvestrand, Robert Elz, Roger Fajman, Aviva Garrett, Tom Harsch, Dan Kohn, Bill McQuillan, Keith Moore, Chris Newman , Pete Resnick and Henning Schulzrinne.
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Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1997). All Rights Reserved.
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