ANTLR installation and usage on ubuntu 14.04
In this article we will look at installation and usage of ANTLRsoftware
ANTLR (ANother Tool for Language Recognition) is a powerful parser generator for reading, processing, executing, or translating structured text or binary files. It’s widely used to build languages, tools, and frameworks.
Download
Antlr repository can be downloaded by running the below commands
git clone https://github.com/antlr/antlr4.git
Pre Requisites
Antlr requires Apache maven build manager for Java projects.
sudo apt-get install maven maven2
python 3.5
- Download the source files from
https://www.python.org/downloads/source/
- build and install python 3.5
./configure
make
sudo make install
Compile
Antlr can be compiled by executing the below command
mvn compile
mvn install
This will deploy antlr in the default location
~/.m2/repository
The main antlr jar files is located at
~/.m2/repository/org/antlr/antlr4/4.5/antlr4-4.5.jar
to use this we need to set classpath as follows
export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:~/.m2/repository/org/antlr/antlr4/4.5/antlr4-4.5.jar
Execution
Put the following grammar inside file Hello.g4
// Define a grammar called Hello
grammar Hello;
r : 'hello' ID ; // match keyword hello followed by an identifier
ID : [a-z]+ ; // match lower-case identifiers
WS : [ \t\r\n]+ -> skip ; // skip spaces, tabs, newlines
Then run ANTLR the tool on it:
$ alias antlr4='java -Xmx500M -cp "~/.m2/repository/org/antlr/antlr4/4.5/antlr4-4.5.jar:$CLASSPATH" org.antlr.v4.Tool'
$ alias grun='java org.antlr.v4.runtime.misc.TestRig'
$ antlr4 Hello.g4
$ javac Hello*.java
To test it run the following command
$ grun Hello r -tree input.txt
contents of input.txt file is hello world
This will give a GUI with parse tree displayed in the output
That pops up a dialog box showing that rule r matched keyword hello followed by identifier parrt.
Reference
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/antlr/antlr4/master/doc/getting-started.md1