[antlr-interest] Handling Antlr Syntax Errors or how to give a better message on unexpected token

[Burton Samograd]

Hello,

We have the following sub-part of an Antlr grammar:

    signed_int
            : SIGN? INT
                    ;

    INT : '0'..'9'+
            ;

When someone enters a numeric value everything is fine, but if they
mistakenly type something like 1O (one and capital o) we get a cryptic
error message like:

    error 1 : Missing token              at offset 14
    near [Index: 0 (Start: 0-Stop: 0) ='<missing COLON>'    type<24> Line: 26 LinePos:14]
     : syntax error...

Obviously our grammar is more complex than the one given above, but this type of
error happens when the user mistypes an integer as above.

What is a good way to handle this type of error?  I thought of
defining a catch-all SYMBOL token type but this lead to too many parser
building errors.  I will continue looking into Antlr error handling but I
thought I would post this here to look for some insights.

Also asked on Stack Overflow:  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10386499/handling-antlr-syntax-errors-or-how-to-give-a-better-message-on-unexpected-token

--
Burton Samograd

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