[antlr-interest] v3: How could I construct a parser for an "active" language such as ASP.Net, PHP or (in my case) Active RTF?

[Eric]

I do not really understand your question but I will give you some ideas
that come to mind. As I am busy, I won't be able to elaborate past giving
these ideas.

1. Check out combined grammars. i.e. A grammar with an embedded grammar,
e.g. JavaScript inside of HTML. I believe the examples from the downloads
page has one.

2. Token stream rewriting between the lexer and the parser. ANTLR includes
methods to help do this; they are noted in the API.

On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 7:40 AM, Peter Crowther
<peter.crowther at melandra.com>wrote:

> Thanks for the input!  I read the RTF spec some time ago, believe I know
> how RTF works, and (luckily) I'm doing a different job.
>
> This application doesn't need to understand RTF. Other than the few
> commands I outline (that aren't RTF tags - note the forward slash not
> backslash), the RTF is presently opaque to the application.  It's just a
> bunch of bytes that need to be output in that order until a processing
> instruction is encountered.  I believe some parser other than the RTF
> parser is appropriate for the job I wish to do with these processing
> instructions :-).
>
> Cheers,
>
> - Peter
>
>
> On 5 April 2012 11:09, Eric <researcher0x00 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Just my thoughts or thinking out loud on this.
>>
>> I played around with RTF a few years ago because I wanted to make an
>> editor/diff tool that could add tags to change the properties of the text,
>> i.e. color, underlining, etc., something like HTML. If I remember
>> correctly, one of the interesting aspects of RTF was that it was designed
>> to be read and processed sequentially in one pass. If the tags were done
>> correctly, you could start at a marked boundary and continue processing,
>> even in the middle of the stream. This was highly advantageous when working
>> with long documents of hundreds of pages or more.
>>
>> From the Rich Text Format (RTF) Specification Version 1.9.1
>>
>> "A sample RTF parsing reader program is given in Appendix A: Sample RTF
>> Reader Application. This sample RTF reader is designed for use in
>> conjunction with this document to assist those interested in developing
>> their own RTF readers. The sample RTF reader is not a for-sale product, and
>> Microsoft does not provide technical support or any other kind of support
>> for the sample RTF parsing reader code or this document. "
>>
>> I would seriously read the RTF specs first and truly understand how RTF
>> works before using ANTLR with it. You may be walking through a door you
>> wish you never opened.
>>
>> Do not take this as implying ANTLR is terrible. It is merely that you
>> should use the right tool for the right job and here ANTLR is not the right
>> tool, the tool you need is outlined in the RTF spec.
>>
>
>