[antlr-interest] Tracking Character Position in antlr3

[Edson Tirelli]

    Hello All,

    I think this is probably a recurring frequent question, but the 
answers I was able to find, both in the FAQ( 
http://www.jguru.com/faq/view.jsp?EID=550800 ) and the list archives 
seems to refer to antlr 2.x version. So, here we go again:

    We have a parser generated by antlr 3. We also have an IDE built 
over eclipse. We have a requirement from the IDE guys that the parser 
must provide location within the source files as character position from 
the beggining of the file, instead of line/columns.
    Looking through antlr source code, it seems that CommonToken has 
this information encoded as "start" and "stop" indexes and you can get 
them through methods: getStartIndex() and getStopIndex(). I developed 
some unit tests (hardcoding class casts from Token to CommonToken) and 
these attributes are consistent throughout the parsing.

    So, my questions:

1) Is there any reason for these methods to not be exposed in the Token 
interface? In other words, can they be exposed in the Token interface 
implemented by CommonToken? This would avoid the nasty class casts...

2) If not, do you see any reason for me to not do the casts and get the 
info from the CommonToken class?

3) Is there any other better alternative way of doing it?

   Thank you in advance,
    Edson

-- 
 Edson Tirelli
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