[antlr-interest] How to create a rule that matches fast everything!!!

[Gavin Lambert]

At 22:09 11/02/2009, Liviu U wrote:
 >Is there a way to specify:
 >
 >rule
 >: BEGIN   ANY* END;
 >?

Either:

rule
   : BEGIN .* END
   ;

Or (more explicitly):

rule
   : BEGIN (~END)* END
   ;

(ANTLR is normally smart enough to compile the first as if it were 
the second, provided that your end-phrase is inline and fairly 
simple.)

Note however that at parser level this will still create tokens 
for everything between BEGIN and END.  If you don't want to do 
that, then you'll have to create a lexer rule that smooshes 
everything into one token -- but then that'll take out all of 
them, not just at one particular context level.