[antlr-interest] First grammar a simple string template language

[Daniel Lidström]

From: "Kevin J. Cummings" <cummings at kjchome.homeip.net>
> On 09/23/2010 09:50 AM, Daniel Lidström wrote:
>> How do I "capture" the dash and colon? Here's my grammar:
>
> If the "-" and ":" are a part of your format string, then they are not a
> part of your input, are they?  I would think that outputting them would
> be a function of how you handle your format string (which you included
> above).  It looks like you are outputting just the "variable" part of
> your format string and not the "constant" part....
>
> When you parse your format string, you will need to save the constant
> parts verbatim.
>
> Perhaps you can use the "dot notation" (of the lexer) to save anything
> that isn't one of your tokens listed below, and output them verbatim.
> So, you need another token type to catch "anything else".

Thanks for the suggestion. I have taken a step back and my grammar now looks 
like this:

program
	: statement*
	;

statement
	: TEXT
	| variable
	;

variable
	: '[' LETTERS ']'
	;

fragment LETTER : 'a'..'z' | 'A'..'Z' ;
LETTERS : LETTER+ ;
TEXT : ~('[' | ']')+ ;


Using Antlr IDE within Eclipse I can see that this parses something like 
"set status [yyyy]-[M]-[d] [H]:[m]"
correctly (all [...] are treated like variables, the rest are statements). 
My TEXT lexer seems to be working fine. If I try to use the dot, I get an 
error:

TEXT : .+ ;

error(201): /TemplateCommand/src/com/gpsgate/TemplateCommand.g:31:8: The 
following alternatives can never be matched: 1
 |---> TEXT : .+ ;

Is there a way to use dot or should I just be fine with the TEXT lexer as 
is?

Daniel