[antlr-interest] Accessing lexer characters programmatically?

[Susan Jolly]

Thanks Gavin.

Yes, you are correct from a practical point of view and I appreciate your
clear understanding the situation.  I'd thought of doing it the way you
suggested since, even though it is a bit inelegant, ANTLR scanning is so
fast it probably doesn't matter.

However, as you pointed out, "if you need to report mismatches for
characters not actually in the input stream then it won't be sufficient."

The standard use case is that the user would supply the same table when
processing a set of documents over time, possibly in a batch mode. It could
be that the table would be adequate for some documents and not for others.
So it would be nice if I could certify to the user that the table is
adequate in general.  (And, of course, I'd like to be able to do this for
the table I use for testing.)