How to make antlr4 fully tokenize terminal nodes

Question

I'm trying to use Antlr to make a very simple parser, that basically tokenizes a series of .-delimited identifiers.

I've made a simple grammar:

r  : STRUCTURE_SELECTOR ;
STRUCTURE_SELECTOR: '.' (ID STRUCTURE_SELECTOR?)? ;
ID : [_a-z0-9$]* ;             
WS : [ \t\r\n]+ -> skip ;

When the parser is generated, I end up with a single terminal node that represents the string instead of being able to find further STRUCTURE_SELECTORs. I'd like instead to see a sequence (perhaps represented as children of the current node). How can I accomplish this?

As an example:

• . would yield one terminal node whose text is .
• .foobar would yield two nodes, a parent with text . and a child with text foobar
• .foobar.baz would yield four nodes, a parent with text ., a child with text foobar, a second-level child with text ., and a third-level child with text baz.

Answer 1

Rules starting with a capital letter are Lexer rules.

With the following input file t.text

.
.foobar
.foobar.baz

your grammar (in file Question.g4) produces the following tokens

$ grun Question r -tokens -diagnostics t.text
[@0,0:0='.',<STRUCTURE_SELECTOR>,1:0]
[@1,2:8='.foobar',<STRUCTURE_SELECTOR>,2:0]
[@2,10:20='.foobar.baz',<STRUCTURE_SELECTOR>,3:0]
[@3,22:21='<EOF>',<EOF>,4:0]

The lexer (parser) is greedy. It tries to read as many input characters (tokens) as it can with the rule. The lexer rule STRUCTURE_SELECTOR: '.' (ID STRUCTURE_SELECTOR?)? can read a dot, an ID, and again a dot and an ID (due to repetition marker ?), till the NL. That's why each line ends up in a single token.

When compiling the grammar, the error

warning(146): Question.g4:5:0: non-fragment lexer rule ID can match the empty string

comes because the repetition marker of ID is * (which means 0 or more times) instead of +(one or more times).

Now try this grammar :

grammar Question;

r  
@init {System.out.println("Question last update 2135");}
    :   ( structure_selector NL )+ EOF
    ;

structure_selector
    :   '.'
    |   '.' ID structure_selector*
    ;

ID  : [_a-z0-9$]+ ;   
NL  : [\r\n]+ ;          
WS  : [ \t]+ -> skip ;

$ grun Question r -tokens -diagnostics t.text
[@0,0:0='.',<'.'>,1:0]
[@1,1:1='\n',<NL>,1:1]
[@2,2:2='.',<'.'>,2:0]
[@3,3:8='foobar',<ID>,2:1]
[@4,9:9='\n',<NL>,2:7]
[@5,10:10='.',<'.'>,3:0]
[@6,11:16='foobar',<ID>,3:1]
[@7,17:17='.',<'.'>,3:7]
[@8,18:20='baz',<ID>,3:8]
[@9,21:21='\n',<NL>,3:11]
[@10,22:21='<EOF>',<EOF>,4:0]
Question last update 2135
line 3:7 reportAttemptingFullContext d=1 (structure_selector), input='.'
line 3:7 reportContextSensitivity d=1 (structure_selector), input='.'

and $ grun Question r -gui t.text displays the hierarchical tree structure you are expecting.