[antlr-interest] multi-line chat messages

[ian eyberg]

Hi,

  I have some text that looks like this:

sally sue slaps userX with a big fish
userX: I like to chat and take up one line
and then I like to continue onto a second line
joe blow sneezes
joe blow blows his nose

  There are three different users here:
sally sue, joe blow, userX

  I have no problems with the various actions/commands
that the users do because they do not change
(slaps userX with a big fish, sneezes, blows his nose)

-- however, whenever one of them decides to chat all 
hell breaks loose.. I usually have to rewrite some tokens
as parser rules.. not a huge problem -- just a pain..

anyway, multi-line chats are my big problem here as
my chatrule, as for now, accepts mostly anything EXCEPT
a newline character cause it uses that as the end part of
the rule

my question to you all is what would you do? as you can tell
I don't have quotes or any other bounding type of characters..
the best thing I can think of is to see if my next token would
be a username or one of my other tokens that would come at the
start of a newline

I've attached my test rig and simple grammar

Much appreciation in advance,

-- 
ian eyberg
-------------- next part --------------
grammar Chat;
options {language=Java;}

chatrule        :
    pl=player COLON_SPACE msg=chatmessage {
      System.out.println("player: " + $pl.text);
      System.out.println("message: " + $msg.text);
    };

chatmessage :   ~NEWLINE+;

fragment LOWER_LETTER   :	'a'..'z' ;
fragment UPPER_LETTER   :	'A'..'Z' ;
ALPHA	        :	(LOWER_LETTER | UPPER_LETTER)+ ;

fragment DIGIT  :	('0'..'9')+ ;
INT             :	DIGIT COMMA_SP?;

NEWLINE	        :	'\r'? '\n' ;
UNDER           : '_';
DASH            : '-';

WS              :   ' '+;
COLON_SPACE	:	': ';
COMMA_SP        :	',' ' ' ;
JUNK    :       '.' | '$' | ':' | '(' | ')' | '*' | '?' | '[' | ']' | '|' | ',' | '#' | '-' | '/' | '\'';

player	:	(INT | ALPHA | DASH | UNDER | WS )+;
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