I have a very simple example text which I want to parse with ANTLR, and yet I'm getting wrong results due to ambiguous definition of the rule.
Here is the grammar:
grammar SimpleExampleGrammar;
prog : event EOF;
event : DEFINE EVT_HEADER eventName=eventNameRule;
eventNameRule : DIGIT+;
DEFINE : '#define';
EVT_HEADER : 'EVT_';
DIGIT : [0-9a-zA-Z_];
WS : ('' | ' ' | '\r' | '\n' | '\t') -> channel(HIDDEN);
First text example:
#define EVT_EX1
Second text example:
#define EVT_EX1
#define EVT_EX2
So, the first example is parsed correctly.
However, the second example doesn't work, as the eventNameRule matches the next "#define ..." and the parse tree is incorrect
Appreciate any help to change the grammar to parse this correctly.
Thanks,
Busi
Beside the missing loop specifier you also have a problem in your WS rule. The first alt matches anything. Remove that. And, btw, give your DIGIT rule a different name. It matches more than just digits.
As Adrian pointed out, my main mistake here is that in the initial rule (prog) I used "event" and not "event+" this will solve the issue.
Thanks Adrian.
Related
In one Antlr4 syntax, I need the comment (// xxxx) to be always at the start of a line.
The following grammar works fine for most cases.
grammar com;
comment: COMMENT;
COMMENT
: '\n' '//' .*? '\n'
;
By design, it will match \n//comment\n but not //comment\n. But I also want it to match <BOF>//comment\n. How can I implement it?
You may find that this edit is better handled post-parsing, in a semantic validation pass of your parseTree. (NOTE: It's not a requirement that a parser ONLY recognize valid input, just that it correctly interprets the only way to understand that input.)
For example, does // might be a comment have some other, alternate interpretation if it's not at the beginning of the line?
If not, I would probably just accept the // comment ...\n as a token regardless of it's position in the line.
Then, once you have the parse tree, you can check that you comments always have a column of 0. Doing it this way, your grammar is not tied to a particular target language, and, perhaps more importantly, you can give a "nice" error message like "Comments must begin in the first column of a line".
If you try to handle this in the Lexer (or parser), then, if it's NOT in the correct column, you'll get a much more obtuse recognition error that will be more difficult for users to understand.
That is not possible in a language agnostic way. You will have to add target specific code in your grammar and use a predicate to check if the char position is 0:
COMMENT
: {getCharPositionInLine() == 0}? '//' ~[\r\n]*
;
OTHER
: .
;
If you now tokenize the input:
// start
// middle
?//...
// end
with the Java code:
String input = "// start\n// middle\n?//...\n// end";
comLexer lexer = new comLexer(CharStreams.fromString(input));
CommonTokenStream stream = new CommonTokenStream(lexer);
stream.fill();
for (Token t : stream.getTokens()) {
System.out.printf("%-10s'%s'%n",
comLexer.VOCABULARY.getSymbolicName(t.getType()),
t.getText().replace("\n", "\\n"));
}
the following will be printed to your console:
COMMENT '// start'
OTHER '\n'
COMMENT '// middle'
OTHER '\n'
OTHER '?'
OTHER '/'
OTHER '/'
OTHER '.'
OTHER '.'
OTHER '.'
OTHER '\n'
COMMENT '// end'
EOF '<EOF>'
Note that I also removed the \n at the end of the COMMENT, otherwise a comment at the end of the input would not be matched.
EDIT
How I can do it with JavaScript? I cannot find good examples on internet.
By looking at the Javascript source, it looks like {this.column === 0}? is the Javascript equivalent of {getCharPositionInLine() == 0}?
By the way, does the Intellij Plugin support predict? If it does, does it support only Java?
No, the IntelliJ plugin ignores predicates. After all, the code inside a predicate can be any arbitrary chunk of code, making it quite hard to support.
I'm trying to understand how ANTLR grammars work and I've come across a situation where it behaves unexpectedly and I can't explain why or figure out how to fix it.
Here's the example:
root : title '\n' fields EOF;
title : STR;
fields : field_1 field_2;
field_1 : 'a' | 'b' | 'c';
field_2 : 'd' | 'e' | 'f';
STR : [a-z]+;
There are two parts:
A title that is a lowercase string with no special characters
A two character string representing a set of possible configurations
When I go to test the grammar, here's what happens: first I write the title and, on a new line, give the character for the first field. So far so good. The parse tree looks as I would expect up to this point.
When I add the next field is when the problem comes up. ANTLR decides to reinterpret the line as an instance of STR instead of a concatenation of the fields that I was expecting.
I do not understand why ANTLR tries to force an unrelated terminal expression when it wasn't specified as an option by the grammar. Shouldn't it know to only look for characters matching the field rules since it is descended from the fields node in the parse tree? What's going on here and how do I write my ANTLR grammars so they don't have this problem?
I've read that ANTLR tries to match the format greedily from the top of the grammar to the bottom, but this doesn't explain why this is happening because the STR terminal is the very last line in the file. If ANTLR gives special precedence to matching terminals, how do I format the grammar so that it interprets it properly? As far as I understand, regexes do not work for non-terminals so it seems that have to define it how it is now.
A note of clarification: this is just an example of a possible grammar that I'm trying to make work with the text format as is, so I'm not looking for answers like adding a space between the fields or changing the title to be uppercase.
What I didn't understand before is that there are two steps in generating a parser:
Scanning the input for a list of tokens using the lexer rules (uppercase statements) and then...
Constructing a parse tree using the parser rules (lowercase statements) and generated tokens
My problem was that there was no way for ANTLR to know I wanted that specific string to be interpreted differently when it was generating the tokens. To fix this problem, I wrote a new lexer rule for the fields string so that it would be identifiable as a token. The key was making the FIELDS rule appear before the STR rule because ANTLR checks them in the order they appear.
root : title FIELDS EOF;
title : STR;
FIELDS : [a-c] [d-f];
STR : [a-z]+;
Note: I had to bite the bullet and read the ANTLR Mega Tutorial to figure this out.
I'm trying to build a grammar for a recognizer of a spice-like language using Antlr-3.1.3 (I use this version because of the Python target). I don't have experience with parsers. I've found a master thesis where the student has done the syntactic analysis of the SPICE 2G6 language and built a parser using the LEX and YACC compiler writing tools. (http://digitool.library.mcgill.ca/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=60667&local_base=GEN01-MCG02) In chapter 4, he describes a grammar in Backus-Naur form for the SPICE 2G6 language, and appends to the work the LEX and YACC code files of the parser.
I'm basing myself in this work to create a simpler grammar for a recognizer of a more restrictive spice language.
I read the Antlr manual, but could not figure out how to solve two problems, that the code snippet below illustrates.
grammar Najm_teste;
resistor
: RES NODE NODE VALUE 'G2'? COMMENT? NEWLINE
;
// START:tokens
RES : ('R'|'r') DIG+;
NODE : DIG+; // non-negative integer
VALUE : REAL; // non-negative real
fragment
SIG : '+'|'-';
fragment
DIG : '0'..'9';
fragment
EXP : ('E'|'e') SIG? DIG+;
fragment
FLT : (DIG+ '.' DIG+)|('.' DIG+)|(DIG+ '.');
fragment
REAL : (DIG+ EXP?)|(FLT EXP?);
COMMENT : '%' ( options {greedy=false;} : . )* NEWLINE;
NEWLINE : '\r'? '\n';
WS : (' '|'\t')+ {$channel=HIDDEN;};
// END:tokens
In the grammar above, the token NODE is a subset of the set represented by the VALUE token. The grammar correctly interprets an input like "R1 5 0 1.1/n", but cannot interpret an input like "R1 5 0 1/n", because it maps "1" to the token NODE, instead of mapping it to the token VALUE, as NODE comes before VALUE in the tokens section. Given such inputs, does anyone has an idea of how can I map the "1" to the correct token VALUE, or a suggestion of how can I alter the grammar so that I can correctly interpret the input?
The second problem is the presence of a comment at the end of a line. Because the NEWLINE token delimits: (1) the end of a comment; and (2) the end of a line of code. When I include a comment at the end of a line of code, two newline characters are necessary to the parser correctly recognize the line of code, otherwise, just one newline character is necessary. How could I improve this?
Thanks!
Problem 1
The lexer does not "listen" to the parser. The lexer simply creates tokens that contain as much characters as possible. In case two tokens match the same amount of characters, the token defined first will "win". In other words, "1" will always be tokenized as a NODE, even though the parser is trying to match a VALUE.
You can do something like this instead:
resistor
: RES NODE NODE value 'G2'? COMMENT? NEWLINE
;
value : NODE | REAL;
// START:tokens
RES : ('R'|'r') DIG+;
NODE : DIG+;
REAL : (DIG+ EXP?) | (FLT EXP?);
...
E.g., I removed VALUE, added value and removed fragment from REAL
Problem 2
Do not let the comment match the line break:
COMMENT : '%' ~('\r' | '\n')*;
where ~('\r' | '\n')* matches zero or more chars other than line break characters.
I started to work with antlr a few days ago. I'd like to use it to parse #include macros in c. Only includes are to my interest, all other parts are irrelevant. here i wrote a simple grammar file:
... parser part omitted...
INCLUDE : '#include';
INCLUDE_FILE_QUOTE: '"'FILE_NAME'"';
INCLUDE_FILE_ANGLE: '<'FILE_NAME'>';
fragment
FILE_NAME: ('a'..'z'|'A'..'Z'|'0'..'9'|'_'|'.'|' ')+;
MACROS: '#'('if' | 'ifdef' | 'define' | 'endif' | 'undef' | 'elif' | 'else' );
//MACROS: '#'('a'..'z'|'A'..'Z')+;
OPERATORS: ('+'|'-'|'*'|'/'|'='|'=='|'!='|'>'|'>='|'<'|'<='|'>>'|'<<'|'<<<'|'|'|'&'|','|';'|'.'|'->'|'#');
... other supporting tokens like ID, WS and COMMENT ...
This grammar produces ambiguity when such statement are encountered:
(;i<listLength;i++)
output: mismatched character ';' expecting '>'
Seems it's trying to match INCLUDE_FILE_ANGLE instead of treating the ";" as OPERATORS.
I heard there's an operator called syntactic predicate, but im not sure how to properly use it in this case.
How can i solve this problem in an Antlr encouraged way?
Looks like there's not lots of activity about antlr here.
Anyway i figured this out.
INCLUDE_MACRO: ('#include')=>'#include';
VERSION_MACRO: ('#version')=>'#version';
OTHER_MACRO:
(
|('#if')=>'#if'
|('#ifndef')=>'#ifndef'
|('#ifdef')=>'#ifdef'
|('#else')=>'#else'
|('#elif')=>'#elif'
|('#endif')=>'#endif'
);
This only solves first half of the problem. Secondly, one cannot use the INCLUDE_FILE_ANGLE to match the desired string in the #include directive.
The '<'FILE_NAME'>' stuffs creates ambiguity and must be broken down to basic tokens from lexer or use more advanced context-aware checks. Im not familiar with the later technique, So i wrote this in the parser rule:
include_statement :
INCLUDE_MACRO include_file
-> ^(INCLUDE_MACRO include_file);
include_file
: STRING
| LEFT_ANGLE(INT|ID|OPERATORS)+RIGHT_ANGLE
;
Though this works , but it admittedly looks ugly.
I hope experienced users can comment with much better solution.
I want to have a grammar rule like below in my yacc file:
insert_statement: INSERT INTO NAME (any_token)* ';'
We can skip all the tokens until a given token at an error, in yacc as follows:
stat: error ';'
Is there any mechanism to skip any number of characters in yacc, when there is no error?
Thanks
After sometime I could solve my problem the following way and would like to mention it as it would be helpful to someone:
Add a token definition to lex including the characters that should be in a skipping token:
<*>[A-Za-z0-9_:.-]* { return SKIPPINGTOKS; }
(this would identify any token like a, 1, hello, hello123 etc.)
Then add the following such rules to yacc as required:
insert_statement: INSERT INTO NAME skipping_portion ';'
skipping_portion: SKIPPINGTOKS | skipping_portion SKIPPINGTOKS
Hope this may help someone...
I think you would want to do something like this. It skips any and all tokens that are not the semicolon.
insert_statement: INSERT INTO NAME discardable_tokens_or_epsilon ';' ;
discardable_tokens_or_epsilon: discardable_tokens
| epsilon
;
discardable_tokens: discardable_tokens discardable_token
| discardable_token
;
discardable_token: FOO
| BAR
| BLETCH
...et cetera... anything other than a semicolon
;
epsilon: ;
Simply don't specify a production rule containing those tokens, you'd like to skip.