ANTLR - identifier with whitespace - antlr

Question

i want identifiers that can contain whitespace.
grammar WhitespaceInSymbols;
premise : ( options {greedy=false;} : 'IF' ) id=ID{
System.out.println($id.text);
};
ID : ('a'..'z'|'A'..'Z')+ (' '('a'..'z'|'A'..'Z')+)*
;
WS : ' '+ {skip();}
;
When i test this with "IF statement analyzed" i get a MissingTokenException and the output "IF statement analyzed".
I thought, that by using greedy=false i could tell ANTLR to exit afer 'IF' and take it as a token. But instead the IF is part of the ID.
Is there a way to achieve my goal? I already tried some variations of the greed=false-option, but without success.

Answer 1

I thought, that by using greedy=false i could tell ANTLR to exit afer 'IF' and take it as a token.
No, the parser has nothing to say about the creation of tokens: the input is first tokenized and then the parser rules are applied on these tokens. So setting greedy=false has no effect.
You can do this (creating ID tokens with white spaces), but it will be a horrible solution with many predicates, and a few custom methods in the lexer doing manual look-aheads: you really, really don't want this! A much cleaner solution would be to introduce a id rule in your parser and let it match one or more ID tokens.
A demo:
grammar WhitespaceInSymbols;
premise
: IF id THEN EOF
;
id
: ID+
;
IF
: 'IF'
;
THEN
: 'THEN'
;
ID
: ('a'..'z' | 'A'..'Z')+
;
WS
: ' '+ {skip();}
;
would parse the input IF statement analyzed THEN into the following tree: