Question

Suppose that I have this simple and meaningless grammar:

propagate     :   what^ where*;
what          :   CHAR^;
where         :   NUMBER -> ^(PLUS NUMBER);

NUMBER        :   '0'..'9';
CHAR          :   'a'..'z';
PLUS          :   '+';

If it parses a string like a123456789, it generates an AST like:

What I would to do is to pass the token parsed by what to where and create an AST (for the same input) like:

I tried in the following way:

propagate       :   w=what^ where[$w.text]*;
what            :   CHAR^;
where[String s] :   NUMBER -> ^(PLUS CHAR[s] NUMBER);

NUMBER          :   '0'..'9';
CHAR            :   'a'..'z';
PLUS            :   '+';

it works if what it’s a single token, but what if it is a tree?
Is this the correct approach?

Answer 1

Here’s how:

grammar T;

options {
  output=AST;
  ASTLabelType=CommonTree;
}

parse
 : propagate EOF!
 ;

propagate
 : what^ where[$what.tree]*
 ;

what
 : CHAR
 ;

where[CommonTree lhs]
 : NUMBER -> ^(PLUS {new CommonTree($lhs)} NUMBER)
 ;

NUMBER : '0'..'9';
CHAR   : 'a'..'z';
PLUS   : '+';

ANTLRWorks’ debugger might not display the proper AST: create a small driver class yourself:

import org.antlr.runtime.*;
import org.antlr.runtime.tree.*;
import org.antlr.stringtemplate.*;

public class Main {
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    TLexer lexer = new TLexer(new ANTLRStringStream("a123"));
    TParser parser = new TParser(new CommonTokenStream(lexer));
    CommonTree tree = (CommonTree)parser.parse().getTree();  
    DOTTreeGenerator gen = new DOTTreeGenerator();
    StringTemplate st = gen.toDOT(tree);
    System.out.println(st);
  }
}

To run it, do:

java -cp antlr-3.3.jar org.antlr.Tool T.g 
javac -cp antlr-3.3.jar *.java
java -cp .:antlr-3.3.jar Main > ast.dot

which will result in a DOT-file representing the following AST: