[antlr-interest] Tokenizing question

[Andrew Lentvorski]

I'm trying to get the following input:
( a1 = ( a2 = v2 ) )

To tokenize like this:

'(' MWS TT="a1" MWS '=' MWS '(' MWS TT="a2" MWS '=' MWS TT="v2" MWS ')' ')'

So, when I use this grammar:

grammar test;
tuple	:	'(' MWS? TT MWS? '=' MWS? (tuple | TT) MWS? ')';

MWS	:	WS+;
WS	:	(' '|'\t'|'\n'|'\r');
TT	:	~('(' | '=' | ')')+;

Why is it tokenizing like this:

'(' TT=" a1 " '=' MWS '(' TT=" a2 " '=' TT=" v2 " ')' ')'

Just to forestall the question, no, you may *NOT* skip or disable
whitespace.

Sorry for the stupid newbie questions, but I'm trying to use ANTLR for
data format translation and the idioms for language translation don't
seem to work so well.

-a