[antlr-interest] help with grammar

[Lucien Stals]

I'm working on a project which involves parsing a file in ASAP2 format. 
Has anyone had experience with this format before?

I am inexperienced with writing parser grammars and there has been a 
steep learning curve for me (which I'm not complaining about), but I 
have hit a bit of a wall.

The files I'm working with basically have a header section for which I 
have been able to write grammar rules for. Then there is a meta data 
section which describes how the rest of the document is structured. In 
some ways this is like an XML schema in that the exact format is not 
known until the schema is read.

To me, it's starting to look like I have to write on grammar to read the 
meta section and then generate a *second* grammar on the fly to read the 
rest of the document. This seems like a lot of work and I want to know 
I'm not barking up the wrong tree before I go too far with this.

Has anyone had experience with this file format before (ASAP2 with A2ML 
as the meta section)?

Or has anyone had experience with something similar?

I'd love to talk to you about your experiences is you have. Or can 
anyone point me in the direction of somebody I could talk to about this.

Thanks heaps.

Lucien.

-- 
      Lucien Stals
    Research Engineer
  Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies
   Swinburne University of Technology
  PO Box 218 Hawthorn, 3122, Australia
      email: lstals at swin.edu.au
  telephone: +61 3 9214 5735
        fax: +61 3 9819 0823
     office: EW307a