I am writing a grammar with a lot of case-insensitive keywords in ANTLR4. I collected some example files for the format, that I try to test parse and some use the same tokens which exist as keywords as identifiers in other places. For example there is a CORE
keyword, which in other places is used as a ID
for a structure from user input. Here some parts of my grammar:
fragment A : [aA]; // match either an 'a' or 'A'
fragment B : [bB];
fragment C : [cC];
[...]
CORE: C O R E ;
[...]
IDSTRING: [a-zA-Z_] [a-zA-Z0-9_]*;
id: IDSTRING ;
The error thrown then is line 7982:8 mismatched input 'core' expecting IDSTRING
, as the user input is intended as IDSTRING
, but always eaten by the keyword rule. In the input it exists both as keyword and as id like this:
MACRO oa12f01
CLASS CORE ; #here it is a KEYWORD
[...]
SITE core ; #here it is a ID
Is there a way I can let users use some keywords as identifiers by changing my grammar somehow like "casting" the token to IDSTRING
for conjunctive rules like this or is this a false hope in not hand written parsers?