How do you parse with ANTLR?

What you need to do to get a parse tree:

  1. define a lexer and parser grammar.
  2. invoke ANTLR: it will generate a lexer and a parser in your target language (e.g., Java, Python, C#, JavaScript)
  3. use the generated lexer and parser: you invoke them passing the code to recognize and they return to you a parse tree.

What can you do with ANTLR?

ANTLR is a powerful parser generator that you can use to read, process, execute, or translate structured text or binary files. It’s widely used in academia and industry to build all sorts of languages, tools, and frameworks. Twitter search uses ANTLR for query parsing, with over 2 billion queries a day.

How does an ANTLR work?

ANTLR is code generator. It takes so called grammar file as input and generates two classes: lexer and parser. The stream of tokes is passed to parser which do all necessary work. It is the parser who builds abstract syntax tree, interprets the code or translate it into some other form.

What is the output of ANTLR?

ANTLR generates output files in the current directory by default. This option specifies the output directory where ANTLR should generate parsers, listeners, visitors, and tokens files.

What is the use of parsing?

A parser is a compiler or interpreter component that breaks data into smaller elements for easy translation into another language. A parser takes input in the form of a sequence of tokens, interactive commands, or program instructions and breaks them up into parts that can be used by other components in programming.

What is visitor in ANTLR?

Listener methods are called automatically by the ANTLR provided walker object, whereas visitor methods must walk their children with explicit visit calls. Listener uses an explicit stack allocated on the heap, whereas visitor uses call stack to manage tree traversals.

Is ANTLR slow?

ANTLR can use two different prediction modes: SLL and LL*. They are also known as parsing strategies. This is very slow and it is only used to debug your parser.

What is a grammar ANTLR?

ANTLR takes as input a grammar that specifies a language and generates as output source code for a recognizer of that language. A language is specified using a context-free grammar expressed using Extended Backus–Naur Form (EBNF). ANTLR can generate lexers, parsers, tree parsers, and combined lexer-parsers.

Why do we need parsing?

Fundamentally, parsing is necessary because different entities need the data to be in different forms. Parsing allows transforming data in a way that can be understood by a specific software. The obvious example is programs — they are written by humans, but they must be executed by computers.

Why CLR parser is most powerful?

When the parser looks ahead in the input buffer to decide whether the reduction is to be done or not the information about the terminals is available in the state of the parser itself which is not in case of SLR parser state. Hence CLR(1) parser is more powerful than SLR.

Where does ANTLR generate output files without command line arguments?

If you invoke the ANTLR tool without command line arguments, you’ll get a help message: Here are more details on the options: ANTLR generates output files in the current directory by default. This option specifies the output directory where ANTLR should generate parsers, listeners, visitors, and tokens files.

How to make your own X tool in ANTLR?

To make your own called X, create resource org/antlr/v4/tool/templates/messages/formats/ X and place it in the CLASSPATH. This option tells ANTLR to generate a parse tree listener and is the default. This option tells ANTLR not to generate a parse tree listener.

Who is the creator of the ANTLR parser?

From a grammar, ANTLR generates a parser that can build and walk parse trees. Terence Parr is the maniac behind ANTLR and has been working on language tools since 1989. He is a professor of computer science at the University of San Francisco .

What do you need to know about ANTLR?

What is ANTLR? ANTLR (ANother Tool for Language Recognition) is a powerful parser generator for reading, processing, executing, or translating structured text or binary files. It’s widely used to build languages, tools, and frameworks. From a grammar, ANTLR generates a parser that can build and walk parse trees.