An Introduction to ANTLR: A parser toolkit for problems large and small

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You've been there before, you can almost solve your current parsing problem with this horribly complicated regular expression, with look-aheads and look-behinds and nested groups..you know you should be using a real parser to solve the problem, but Yacc is too big a hammer to solve this problem. ANTLR is designed to be an easy to use parser generator, with a combined lexer and parser grammar, a natural, easy to follow, parsing algorithm and the ability to generate the parser in your favourite language.

If you're working in a dedicated field you've probably wanted to describe your problem in a Domain Specific Language, but have seen the task of describing and parsing your language as too difficult, ANTLR is designed to make this task easy.

This session will guide you through creating parsers for small, simple problems right up to creating AST's to describe your Domain Specific Language. At each stage the actual generated code will be explored; the power of ANTLR comes from being able to follow the generated code.

Stream: Development Tools

Paper: Introduction to ANTLR, An, Introduction to ANTLR, An

Clinton is a software engineer with an interest in improving software quality through good design, testing, and automation. Clinton has had the pleasure of using open source tools throughout his entire career.