[antlr-interest] Reading block of arbitrary text delimited by curly braces

[Burton Samograd]

Hello,

We have a requirement where we need to include a block of arbitrary text in a block, like so:

BLOCK { some arbitrary text here }

We initially got around this by making the whole block a token, like:

BLOCK : 'BLOCK (' '|'\t'|'\r'|'\n')* '{' (~'}')*  '}' ;

but this is less than ideal.  I am thinking that we would use something like:

block : BLOCK RCURLY BLOCK_DATA LCURLY

with BLOCK : 'BLOCK' and LCURLY/RCURLY as { and }.

I am stuck on specifying BLOCK_DATA which is basically .* to the lexer.  I have attempted to access the input stream from the parser RECOGNIZER but have not been able to come up with a solution.

I am looking to basically hijack the input stream after seeing a BLOCK token so I can read the arbitrary text; I can parse out the  { } as needed.

Is this possible?

--
Burton Samograd

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