Automat is a Clojure and ClojureScript library for defining and using finite-state automata, inspired by Ragel. However, instead of defining a DSL, it allows them to be built using simple composition of functions.

These automata, once compiled, are quite fast. An array with 100 million elements can be processed in 500ms, giving a mean transition time of 5ns. However, Automat isn't just for high throughput use cases; it's meant to be useful wherever an FSM is necessary.

[automat "0.2.4"]

Full documentation can be found here.

A finite-state machine or finite-state automaton is defined as a series of states and transitions between these states, driven by a sequence of inputs. The automaton begins at a start state, and proceeds through the transitions until it reaches an accept state. If given an input that isn't a valid transition, the automaton may either reject the input sequence or reset to the beginning, depending on the use case.

In Automat, the simplest automaton is simply a vector representing a chain of valid inputs.

> (require '[automat.viz :refer (view)])
nil
> (require '[automat.core :as a])
nil
> (view [1 2 3])

The circle on the left is the start state, and the circle on the right with the double-lined border is the accept state. Note that the transitions don't have to be numbers:

> (view [:foo "bar" 'baz])

Each argument to fsm can either be an input or another automaton.

> (view [1 [2 [3]]])

Note that this is identical to the first automaton. If you want to consume inputs which are vectors without them being flattened, they can be represented as lists:

> (view [1 '(2 (3))])

We can also combine existing automatons using the operators in automat.core:

> (view (a/or [1 2 3] [1 3]))

This represents the union of the two automata, and returns an automaton which will either accept 1, 2, 3 or 1, 3.

If we want to accept a range of inputs, we can use range:

> (view [1 (a/range 2 10) 11])

This will accept 1, 2, 11, 1, 3, 11, and so on. If we subsequently want to narrow this, we can use and:

> (view
    (a/and
      [1 (a/range 2 7) 11]
      [1 (a/range 6 12) 11]))

This represents the intersection of two automata, in this case giving us an automaton that either accepts 1, 6, 11 or 1, 7, 11. Note that if the intersection is empty, this will give us an automaton that cannot accept anything.

> (view (a/difference (a/range 1 10) 2 (a/range 5 6)))

This represents the difference between the automata, in this case an automata that accepts [1,10], less the inputs 2, 5, 6.

The operators *, +, and ? behave as they do in regular expressions:

> (view [(a/? 1) (a/* 2) (a/+ 3)])

This gives us an automaton that accepts zero or one 1 inputs, zero or more 2 inputs, and one or more 3 inputs.

The not operator is equivalent to the regex ^ flag for negating character classes:

> (view [1 (a/not 2) 3])

In this diagram, DEF represents the default transition (in this case, anything but 2), and REJ represents a rejection state. The DEF transition will consume the input, but the transition to the REJ state will not.

Once we've defined an FSM, we can compile it:

(a/compile [1 2 3])

This will optimize the FSM, emit code that processes it, and call eval on it. The resulting compiled FSM can be interacted with via advance, find, greedy-find. These operations are pure, and can be safely called on multiple threads.

Notice that when we visualize a compiled FSM, the states themselves are now labeled:

> (view (a/compile [4 5 6]))

The simplest way to interact with a compiled FSM is (advance fsm state input). It takes a state, which will be discussed later, and a single input.

> (def f (a/compile [1 2 3]))
#'f
> (a/advance f nil 1)
{:accepted? false
 :checkpoint nil
 :state-index 1
 :start-index 0
 :stream-index 1
 :value nil}

This returns a map representing the FSM state produced by the input.

This map can be passed back into advance as the state parameter:

> (def adv (partial a/advance f))
#'adv
> (-> nil (adv 1) (adv 2) (adv 3))
{:accepted? true
 :checkpoint nil
 :state-index 3
 :start-index 0
 :stream-index 3
 :value nil}

Notice that advance either accepts the map descriptor returned by a previous call to advance, or an arbitrary value, representing an initial value at the beginning of the FSM. The reasons for this are shown below.

If we pass an input into advance that isn't accepted by the FSM, it will throw an exception. Alternately, we can pass an additional field into advance specifying what it should return if the input is rejected:

> (a/advance f nil 42)
IllegalArgumentException
> (a/advance f nil 42 :error)
:error

Normal finite-state automata are represented only by the state-index. The additional fields give us some additional capabilities; of special interest is the value field, which allows us to treat the FSM as a pattern-matching reduction over a stream of values.

We can define reduction operations within our FSM using the $ function:

> (def f (a/compile
           [1 2 3 (a/$ :complete)]
           {:reducers {:complete (fn [state input] :completed)}}))
#'f
> (view f)

As shown here, the :complete action is something that's associated with the previous input, in this case 3. Then, when calling compile, we associate a reduce function with that action, which takes the current reduce :value and the latest input. In this case, it simply returns :completed when it gets the sequence [1 2 3].

> (def adv (partial a/advance f))
#'adv
> (-> :incomplete (adv 1) (adv 2) :value)
:incomplete
> (-> :incomplete (adv 1) (adv 2) (adv 3) :value)
:completed

While this is a fairly trivial application, there are a wide variety of ways this can be used. For instance, this means that unlike a normal automaton, we can tell whether a list of parentheses are balanced, by tracking the number of un-closed parens in our :value.

For a more real-world use case, consider tracking browsing behavior on an online store. We want to see when the customer visits the cart, begins to checkout, but then returns back to the cart without having completed the checkout. Seeing this indecisive behavior, we can make a special offer.

This means that we want to track this pattern:

[:cart :checkout :cart]

However, the user may wander around a bit, so we want to allow for arbitrary pages in between:

> (def pages [:cart :checkout :cart])
#'pages
> (def page-pattern
    (vec
      (interpose (a/* a/any) pages)))
#'page-pattern
> (view page-pattern)

Here we've interposed (a/* a/any) between each transition, which will happily accept zero or more pages that don't match the expected pattern. However, the data that represents our pages is likely more complicated than just a keyword. Likely it will be a map describing the URL, the page contents, and so on.

In this case, we want to define the :signal when compiling the FSM, which is a function that takes the raw input, and returns the signal that will actually be matched on. In this case, let's assume that each pageview is represented by a map with a :page-type field that will contain :cart, :checkout, and others. Let's also assume that we want to keep track of the full data for the cart and checkout pages.

This is all fairly straightforward:

> (def page-pattern
    (->> [:cart :checkout :cart]
         (map #(vector [% (a/$ :save)]))
         (interpose (a/* a/any))
         vec))
#'page-pattern

> (def f
    (a/compile

      [(a/$ :init)
       page-pattern
       (a/$ :offer)]

      {:signal :page-type
       :reducers {:init (fn [m _] (assoc m :offer-pages []))
                  :save (fn [m page] (update-in m [:offer-pages] conj page))
                  :offer (fn [m _] (assoc m :offer? true))}}))
#'f
> (view f)

First, we take each of the notable pages and add a :save action to them. Then we interpose the wildcard matcher to each. Then we define reducer functions that saves the full page data under :offer-pages, and sets :offer? to true if we continue through the whole process.

Notice that the first action doesn't have an associated input, it simply happens upon entering the FSM. Notice too that the final input has two associated actions. This is perfectly safe, but the order in which the actions occur is not well-defined, so they should always be indepenent of each other. If the same action is defined twice on a given transition, it will only be performed once.

This is a fairly verbose way to define simple behavior, but it's worth noting that almost everything except for the [:cart :checkout :cart] sequence can be abstracted away. With the proper domain-specific scaffolding, this can be a powerful declarative mechanism.

It's also easy to extend. Let's say that we want to save any :product pages the user visits, to better inform our offer. This is a fairly small modification:

> (view
    (->> [:cart :checkout :cart]
         (map #(vector [% (a/$ :save)]))
         (interpose
           (a/*
             (a/or
               [:product (a/$ :save)]
               a/any)))
         vec))

As our desired behavior gets more complicated, they can still be defined as small, composable pieces of behavior.

Using this FSM would be indeed pretty straightforward :

> (def adv (partial a/advance f))
> (-> nil
      (adv {:page-type :cart})
      (adv {:page-type :product})
      (adv {:page-type :product})
      (adv {:page-type :product})
      (adv :anything)
      (adv {:page-type :checkout})
      (adv {:page-type :product})
      (adv {:page-type :cart}) :value)
{:offer-pages [{:page-type :cart}
               {:page-type :product}
               {:page-type :product}
               {:page-type :product}
               {:page-type :checkout}
               {:page-type :product}
               {:page-type :cart}],
 :offer? true}

find works similarly to regex matching. It takes the stream of inputs, which can be a byte-array, java.nio.Buffer, java.io.InputStream, java.io.Reader, or a normal Clojure sequence. The inputs in the FSM correspond to elements from these streams, which will be consumed until an accept state is reached, or the end of the stream is reached. In either case, find will return a new state.

If a match is found, accepted? will be true, start-index will be the point within the stream where the match begins, and stream-index will be the point where the match ends.

> (a/find f nil [1 2 3])
{:accepted? true, :checkpoint nil, :state-index 3, :start-index 0, :stream-index 3, :value nil}

If accepted? is false, the start-index will describe where the FSM last restarted. This state can be passed into find with a new stream of inputs.

> (a/find f nil [1 2 1 2])
{:accepted? false, :checkpoint nil, :state-index 2, :start-index 2, :stream-index 4, :value nil)}

In either case, state-index will describe where we are in the actual compiled automaton. This can be correlated by calling automat.viz/view on a compiled FSM.

When defining patterns that are subsets of each other, such as (or [1 2] [1 2 3]), find will always return upon matching the shortest of the two. If we want to match on the longest, we can use greedy-find instead. Note that greedy-find will always consume at least one more input than it needs for the match, which means that reduce actions used with it must not have side effects.

When using $ for accumulation tasks with find or greedy-find, it can be tedious to place an accumulation reduce function in between every transition. In these cases, we can simply use interpose-$:

> (def f
    (a/compile
      [(a/$ :clear) (a/interpose-$ :conj (range 5))]
      {:reducers {:clear (constantly [])
                  :conj conj}}))
#'f
> (a/find f nil (range 5))
{:accepted? true, :checkpoint nil, :state-index 5, :start-index 0, :stream-index 5, :value [0 1 2 3 4]}

Using $ can be a powerful tool, but it will have a performance impact - for high throughput use cases prefer using the :start-index and :stream-index values to pull out the input data in bulk.

Automat in ClojureScript works just as it does in Clojure except that there is no ClojureScript version of automat.viz.

Compiling FSMs can be slow if they have many states. While rarely a concern for JVM applications, quick startup time is often crucial for client-side JavaScript applications. If you find that compiling your ClojureScript FSMs is too slow, consider defining and precompiling them in Clojure:

(ns clj.namespace
  (:require
   [automat.core :as a]))

(defmacro get-fsm []
  (->> [:foo :bar :baz]
       (a/interpose-$ :conj)
       a/precompile))

(ns cljs.namespace
  (:require
   [automat.core :as a])
  (:require-macros
   [clj.namespace :refer [get-fsm]]))

(def fsm
  (a/compile (get-fsm) {:reducers {:conj conj}}))

(defn fsm-find [input]
  (a/find fsm nil input))

(fsm-find [:foo :bar :baz])
;=> {:accepted? true, :checkpoint nil, :state-index 3, :start-index 0, :stream-index 3, :value (:baz :bar :foo)}

Copyright © 2014 Zachary Tellman

Distributed under the MIT License