[antlr-interest] v3: How could I construct a parser for an "active" language such as ASP.Net, PHP or (in my case) Active RTF?

[Peter Crowther]

Thanks for the input!  I read the RTF spec some time ago, believe I know
how RTF works, and (luckily) I'm doing a different job.

This application doesn't need to understand RTF. Other than the few
commands I outline (that aren't RTF tags - note the forward slash not
backslash), the RTF is presently opaque to the application.  It's just a
bunch of bytes that need to be output in that order until a processing
instruction is encountered.  I believe some parser other than the RTF
parser is appropriate for the job I wish to do with these processing
instructions :-).

Cheers,

- Peter

On 5 April 2012 11:09, Eric <researcher0x00 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Just my thoughts or thinking out loud on this.
>
> I played around with RTF a few years ago because I wanted to make an
> editor/diff tool that could add tags to change the properties of the text,
> i.e. color, underlining, etc., something like HTML. If I remember
> correctly, one of the interesting aspects of RTF was that it was designed
> to be read and processed sequentially in one pass. If the tags were done
> correctly, you could start at a marked boundary and continue processing,
> even in the middle of the stream. This was highly advantageous when working
> with long documents of hundreds of pages or more.
>
> From the Rich Text Format (RTF) Specification Version 1.9.1
>
> "A sample RTF parsing reader program is given in Appendix A: Sample RTF
> Reader Application. This sample RTF reader is designed for use in
> conjunction with this document to assist those interested in developing
> their own RTF readers. The sample RTF reader is not a for-sale product, and
> Microsoft does not provide technical support or any other kind of support
> for the sample RTF parsing reader code or this document. "
>
> I would seriously read the RTF specs first and truly understand how RTF
> works before using ANTLR with it. You may be walking through a door you
> wish you never opened.
>
> Do not take this as implying ANTLR is terrible. It is merely that you
> should use the right tool for the right job and here ANTLR is not the right
> tool, the tool you need is outlined in the RTF spec.
>