In ANTLR v4, there are no longer gated semantic predicates, { … }?=>, and there are also no longer syntactic predicates, ( … )=>, because the parsing algorithm used in v4 can resolve the ambiguities (the need for such predicates are no longer needed). So, this should just work for you: expr : refIdentifier | … Read more
Negating can occur inside lexer and parser rules. Inside lexer rules you can negate characters, and inside parser rules you can negate tokens (lexer rules). But both lexer- and parser rules can only negate either single characters, or single tokens, respectively. A couple of examples: lexer rules To match one or more characters except lowercase … Read more
Since I’ve had a little bit of a struggle with the two existing answers, I’d like to share the solution I ended up with. First of all I created my own version of an ErrorListener like Sam Harwell suggested: public class ThrowingErrorListener extends BaseErrorListener { public static final ThrowingErrorListener INSTANCE = new ThrowingErrorListener(); @Override public … Read more
In ANTLR, the lexer is isolated from the parser, which means it will split the text into typed tokens according to the lexer grammar rules, and the parser has no influence on this process (it cannot say “give me an INTEGER now” for instance). It produces a token stream by itself. Furthermore, the parser doesn’t … Read more
This seems to be a common misunderstanding of ANTLR: Language Processing in ANTLR: The Language Processing is done in two strictly separated phases: Lexing, i.e. partitioning the text into tokens Parsing, i.e. building a parse tree from the tokens Since lexing must preceed parsing there is a consequence: The lexer is independent of the parser, … Read more
By default, ANTLR 4 generates listeners. But if you give org.antlr.v4.Tool the command line parameter -visitor, ANTLR generates visitor classes for you. These work much like listeners, but give you more control over which (sub) trees are walked/visited. This is particularly useful if you want to exclude certain (sub) trees (like else/if blocks, as in … Read more
Ok, let’s build a simple math example. Building an AST is totally overkill for such a task but it’s a nice way to show the principle. I’ll do it in C# but the Java version would be very similar. The grammar First, let’s write a very basic math grammar to work with: grammar Math; compileUnit … Read more
Note: this answer is for ANTLR3! If you’re looking for an ANTLR4 example, then this Q&A demonstrates how to create a simple expression parser, and evaluator using ANTLR4. You first create a grammar. Below is a small grammar that you can use to evaluate expressions that are built using the 4 basic math operators: +, … Read more
ANTLR 4 For predicates in ANTLR 4, checkout these stackoverflow Q&A’s: Syntax of semantic predicates in Antlr4 Semantic predicates in ANTLR4? ANTLR 3 A semantic predicate is a way to enforce extra (semantic) rules upon grammar actions using plain code. There are 3 types of semantic predicates: validating semantic predicates; gated semantic predicates; disambiguating semantic … Read more