No spaces between tokens in ANTLR - antlr

I'm writing a very simple subset of a C# grammar as an exercise.
However, I have a rule which whitespaces are giving me some troubles.
I want to distinguish the following:
int a;
int? b;
Where the the first is a "regular" int type and the second is a nullable int type.
However, with my current grammar I'm not being able to parse this.
type : typeBase x='?' -> { x == null } typeBase
-> ^('?' typeBase)
;
typeBase : 'int'
| 'float'
;
The thing is that whith these rules, it only works with a whitespace before '?', like this:
int ? a;
Which I'd don't want.
Any ideas?

1) Your definition of whitespace seems to be flawed ... the grammar you present should accept "int?" and "int ?". Maybe you should take a look of the definition of whitespace.
2) If you want to disallow "int ? a" you can define extra tokens 'int?' and 'float?' ... normally you allow whitespace to appear between every token, so you have to make it one token.

Related

How to solve ambiguity in with keywords as identifiers in grammar kit

I've been trying to write the graphql language grammar for grammarkit and I've found myself really stuck on an ambiguity issue for quite some time now. Keywords in graphql (such as: type, implements, scalar ) can also be names of types or fields. I.E.
type type implements type {}
At first I defined these keywords as tokens in the bnf but that'd mean the case above is invalid. But if I write these keywords directly as I'm describing the rule, It results in an ambiguity in the grammar.
An example of an issue I'm seeing based on this grammar below is if you define something like this
directive #foo on Baz | Bar
scalar Foobar #cool
the PSI viewer is telling me that in the position of #cool it's expecting a DirectiveAddtlLocation, which is a rule I don't even reference in the scalar rule. Is anyone familiar with grammarkit and have encountered something like this? I'd really appreciate some insight. Thank You.
Here's an excerpt of grammar for the error example I mentioned above.
{
tokens=[
LEFT_PAREN='('
RIGHT_PAREN=')'
PIPE='|'
AT='#'
IDENTIFIER="regexp:[_A-Za-z][_0-9A-Za-z]*"
WHITE_SPACE = 'regexp:\s+'
]
}
Document ::= Definition*
Definition ::= DirectiveTypeDef | ScalarTypeDef
NamedTypeDef ::= IDENTIFIER
// I.E. #foo #bar(a: 10) #baz
DirectivesDeclSet ::= DirectiveDecl+
DirectiveDecl ::= AT TypeName
// I.E. directive #example on FIELD_DEFINITION | ARGUMENT_DEFINITION
DirectiveTypeDef ::= 'directive' AT NamedTypeDef DirectiveLocationsConditionDef
DirectiveLocationsConditionDef ::= 'on' DirectiveLocation DirectiveAddtlLocation*
DirectiveLocation ::= IDENTIFIER
DirectiveAddtlLocation ::= PIPE? DirectiveLocation
TypeName ::= IDENTIFIER
// I.E. scalar DateTime #foo
ScalarTypeDef ::= 'scalar' NamedTypeDef DirectivesDeclSet?
Once your grammar sees directive #TOKEN on IDENTIFIER, it consumes a sequence of DirectiveAddtlLocation. Each of those consists of an optional PIPE followed by an IDENTIFIER. As you note in your question, the GraphQL "keywords" are really just special cases of identifiers. So what's probably happening here is that, since you allow any token as an identifier, scalar and Foobar are both being consumed as DirectiveAddtlLocation and it's never actually getting to see a ScalarTypeDef.
# Parses the same as:
directive #foo on Bar | Baz | scalar | Foobar
#cool # <-- ?????
You can get around this by listing out the explicit set of allowed directive locations in your grammar. (You might even be able to get pretty far by just copying the grammar in Appendix B of the GraphQL spec and changing its syntax.)
DirectiveLocation ::= ExecutableDirectiveLocation | TypeSystemDirectiveLocation
ExecutableDirectiveLocation ::= 'QUERY' | 'MUTATION' | ...
TypeSystemDirectiveLocation ::= 'SCHEMA' | 'SCALAR' | ...
Now when you go to parse:
directive #foo on QUERY | MUTATION
# "scalar" is not a directive location, so the DirectiveTypeDef must end
scalar Foobar #cool
(For all that the "identifier" vs. "keyword" distinction is a little weird, I'm pretty sure the GraphQL grammar isn't actually ambiguous; in every context where a free-form identifier is allowed, there's punctuation before a "keyword" could appear again, and in cases like this one there's unambiguous lists of not-quite-keywords that don't overlap.)

ANTLR behaviour with conflicting tokens

How is ANTLR lexer behavior defined in the case of conflicting tokens?
Let me explain what I mean by "conflicting" tokens.
For example, assume that the following is defined:
INT_STAGE : '1'..'6';
INT : '0'..'9'+;
There is a conflict here, because after reading a sequence of digits, the lexer would not know whether there is one INT or many INT_STAGE tokens (or different combinations of both).
After a test, it looks like that if INT is defined after INT_STAGE, the lexer would prefer to find INT_STAGE, but maybe not INT then? Otherwise, no INT_STAGE would ever be found.
Another example would be:
FOOL: ' fool'
FOO: 'foo'
ID : ('a'..'z'|'A'..'Z'|'_'|'%') ('a'..'z'|'A'..'Z'|'0'..'9'|'_'|'%')*;
I was told that this is the "right" order to recognize all the tokens:
while reading "fool" the lexer will find one FOOL token and not FOO ID or something else.
The following logic applies:
the lexer matches as much characters as possible
if after applying rule 1, there are 2 or more rules that match the same amount of characters, the rule defined first will "win"
Taking this into account, the input "1", "2", ..., "6" is tokenized as an INT_STAGE: both INT_STAGE and INT match the same amount of characters, but INT_STAGE is defined first.
The input "12" is tokenized as a INT since it matches the most characters.
I was told that this is the "right" order to recognize all the tokens: while reading "fool" the lexer will find one FOOL token and not FOO ID or something else.
That is correct.

Rule with identical string token twice

Using yacc, I want to parse text like
begin foo ... end foo
The string foo is not known at compile time and there can be different
such strings in the same input.
So far, the only option I see is to check for syntactical correctness after parsing:
block : BEGIN IDENT something END IDENT
{ if (strcmp($2, $5) != 0) yyerror("Mismatch"); }
This feels wrong. The parser should already detect the errors. Is there something built-in to yacc?
yacc only knows about tokens which the lexer can identify. Since those are identical, the lexer could only improve this case by using states.
That is, you could tell lex to remember that it saw a BEGIN and to count the tokens itself, and return a different type of IDENT (and do the checking there).
However, yacc is better suited to this sort of thing, so the answer to the original question is "no", there is no better solution.

Bison parser with operator tokens in variable name

I am new to bison, and have the misfortune of needing to write a parser for a language that may have what would otherwise be an operator within a variable name. For example, depending on context, the expression
FOO = BAR-BAZ
could be interpreted as either:
the variable "FOO" being assigned the value of the variable "BAR" minus the value of the variable "BAZ", OR
the variable "FOO" being assigned the value of the variable "BAR-BAZ"
Fortunately the language requires variable declarations ahead of time, so I can determine whether a given string is a valid variable via a function I've implemented:
bool isVariable(char* name);
that will return true if the given string is a valid variable name, and false otherwise.
How do I tell bison to attempt the second scenario above first, and only if (through use of isVariable()) that path fails, go back and try it as the first scenario above? I've read that you can have bison try multiple parsing paths and cull invalid ones when it encounters a YYERROR, so I've tried a set of rules similar to:
variable:
STRING { if(!isVariable($1)) YYERROR; }
;
expression:
expression '-' expression
| variable
;
but when given "BAR-BAZ" the parser tries it as a single variable and just stops completely when it hits the YYERROR instead of exploring the "BAR" - "BAZ" path as I expect. What am I doing wrong?
Edit:
I'm beginning to think that my flex rule for STRING might be the culprit:
((A-Z0-9][-A-Z0-9_///.]+)|([A-Z])) {yylval.sval = strdup(yytext); return STRING;}
In this case, if '-' appears in the middle of alphanumeric characters, the whole lot is treated as 1 STRING, without the possibility for subdivision by the parser (and therefore only one path explored). I suppose I could manually parse the STRING in the parser action, but it seems like there should be a better way. Perhaps flex could give back alternate token streams (one for the "BAR-BAZ" case and another for the "BAR"-"BAZ" case) that are diverted to different parser stacks for exploration? Is something like that possible?
It's not impossible to solve this problem within a bison-generated parser, but it's not easy, and the amount of hackery required might detract from the readability and verifiability of the grammar.
To be clear, GLR parsers are not fallback parsers. The GLR algorithm explores all possible parses in parallel, and rejects invalid ones as it goes. (The bison implementation requires that the parse converge to a single possible parse; the original GLR algorithm produces forest of parse trees.) Also, the GLR algorithm does not contemplate multiple lexical analyses.
If you want to solve this problem in the context of the parser, you'll probably need to introduce special handling for whitespace, or at least for - which are not surrounded by whitespace. Otherwise, you will not be able to distinguish between a - b (presumably always subtraction) and a-b (which might be the variable a-b if that variable were defined). Leaving aside that issue, you would be looking for something like this (but this won't work, as explained below):
expr : term
| expr '-' term
term : factor
| term '*' factor
factor: var
| '(' expr ')'
var : ident { if (!isVariable($1)) { /* reject this production */ } }
ident : WORD
| ident '-' WORD { $$ = concatenate($1, "-", $3); }
This won't work because the action associated with var : ident is not executed until after the parse has been disambiguated. So if the production is rejected, the parse fails, because the parser has already determined that the production is necessary. (Until the parser makes that determination, actions are deferred.)
Bison allows GLR grammars to use semantic predicates, which are executed immediately instead of being deferred. But that doesn't help, because semantic predicates cannot make use of computed semantic values (since the semantic value computations are still deferred when the semantic predicate is evaluated). You might think you could get around this by making the computation of the concatenated identifier (in the second ident production) a semantic predicate, but then you run into another limitation: semantic predicates do not themselves have semantic values.
Probably there is a hack which will get around this problem, but that might leave you with a different problem. Suppose that a, c, a-b and b-c are defined variables. Then, what is the meaning of a-b-c? Is it (a-b) - c or a - (b-c) or an error?
If you expect it to be an error, then there is no problem since the GLR parser will find both possible parses and bison-generated GLR parsers signal a syntax error if the parse is ambiguous. But then the question becomes: is a-b-c only an error if it is ambiguous? Or is it an error because you cannot use a subtraction operator without surround whitespace if its arguments are hyphenated variables? (So that a-b-c can only be resolved to (a - b) - c or to (a-b-c), regardless of whether a-b and b-c exist?) To enforce the latter requirement, you'll need yet more complication.
If, on the other hand, your language is expected to model a "fallback" approach, then the result should be (a-b) - c. But making that selection is not a simple merge procedure between two expr reductions, because of the possibility of a higher precedence * operator: d * a-b-c either resolves to (d * a-b) - c or (d * a) - b-c; in those two cases, the parse trees are radically different.
An alternative solution is to put the disambiguation of hyphenated variables into the scanner, instead of the parser. This leads to a much simpler and somewhat clearer definition, but it leads to a different problem: how do you tell the scanner when you don't want the semantic disambiguation to happen? For example, you don't want the scanner to insist on breaking up a variable name into segments when you the name occurs in a declaration.
Even though the semantic tie-in with the scanner is a bit ugly, I'd go with that approach in this case. A rough outline of a solution is as follows:
First, the grammar. Here I've added a simple declaration syntax, which may or may not have any resemblance to the one in your grammar. See notes below.
expr : term
| expr '-' term
term : factor
| term '*' factor
factor: VARIABLE
| '(' expr ')'
decl : { splitVariables(false); } "set" VARIABLE
{ splitVariables(true); } '=' expr ';'
{ addVariable($2); /* ... */ }
(See below for the semantics of splitVariables.)
Now, the lexer. Again, it's important to know what the intended result for a-b-c is; I'll outline two possible strategies. First, the fallback strategy, which can be implemented in flex:
int candidate_len = 0;
[[:alpha:]][[:alnum:]]*/"-"[[:alpha:]] { yymore();
candidate_len = yyleng;
BEGIN(HYPHENATED);
}
[[:alpha:]][[:alnum:]]* { yylval.id = strdup(yytext);
return WORD;
}
<HYPHENATED>"-"[[:alpha:]][[:alnum:]]*/"-"[[:alpha:]] {
yymore();
if (isVariable(yytext))
candidate_len = yyleng;
}
<HYPHENATED>"-"[[:alpha:]][[:alnum:]]* { if (!isVariable(yytext))
yyless(candidate_len);
yylval.id = strdup(yytext);
BEGIN(INITIAL);
return WORD;
}
That uses yymore and yyless to find the longest prefix sequence of hyphenated words which is a valid variable. (If there is no such prefix, it chooses the first word. An alternative would be to select the entire sequence if there is no such prefix.)
A similar alternative, which only allows the complete hyphenated sequence (in the case where that is a valid variable) or individual words. Again, we use yyless and yymore, but this time we don't bother checking intermediate prefixes and we use a second start condition for the case where we know we're not going to combine words:
int candidate_len = 0;
[[:alpha:]][[:alnum:]]*/"-"[[:alpha:]] { yymore();
candidate_len = yyleng;
BEGIN(HYPHENATED);
}
[[:alpha:]][[:alnum:]]* { yylval.id = strdup(yytext);
return WORD;
}
<HYPHENATED>("-"[[:alpha:]][[:alnum:]]*)*[[:alpha:]][[:alnum:]]* {
if (isVariable(yytext)) {
yylval.id = strdup(yytext);
BEGIN(INITIAL);
return WORD;
} else {
yyless(candidate_len);
yylval.id = strdup(yytext);
BEGIN(NO_COMBINE);
return WORD;
}
}
<NO_COMBINE>[[:alpha:]][[:alnum:]]* { yylval.id = strdup(yytext);
return WORD;
}
<NO_COMBINE>"-" { return '-'; }
<NO_COMBINE>.|\n { yyless(0); /* rescan */
BEGIN(INITIAL);
}
Both of the above solutions use isVariable to decide whether or not a hyphenated sequence is a valid variable. As mentioned earlier, there must be a way to turn off the check, for example in the case of a declaration. To accomplish this, we need to implement splitVariables(bool). The implementation is straightforward; it simply needs to set a flag visible to isVariable. If the flag is set to true, then isVariable always returns true without actually checking for the existence of the variable in the symbol table.
All of that assumes that the symbol table and the splitVariables flag are shared between the parser and the scanner. A naïve solution would make both of these variables globals; a cleaner solution would be to use a pure parser and lexer, and pass the symbol table structure (including the flag) from the main program into the parser, and from there (using %lex-param) into the lexer.

Issues of Error handling with ANTLR3

I tried error reporting in following manner.
#members{
public String getErrorMessage(RecognitionException e,String[] tokenNames)
{
List stack=getRuleInvocationStack(e,this.getClass().getName());
String msg=null;
if(e instanceof NoViableAltException){
<some code>
}
else{
msg=super.getErrorMessage(e,tokenNames);
}
String[] inputLines = e.input.toString().split("\r\n");
String line = "";
if(e.token.getCharPositionInLine()==0)
line = "at \"" + inputLines[e.token.getLine() - 2];
else if(e.token.getCharPositionInLine()>0)
line = "at \"" + inputLines[e.token.getLine() - 1];
return ": " + msg.split("at")[0] + line + "\" => [" + stack.get(stack.size() - 1) + "]";
}
public String getTokenErrorDisplay(Token t){
return t.toString();
}
}
And now errors are displayed as follows.
line 6:7 : missing CLOSSB at "int a[6;" => [var_declaration]
line 8:0 : missing SEMICOL at "int p" => [var_declaration]
line 8:5 : missing CLOSB at "get(2;" => [call]
I have 2 questions.
1) Is there a proper way to do the same thing I have done?
2) I want to replace CLOSSB, SEMICOL, CLOSB etc. with their real symbols. How can I do that using the map in .g file?
Thank you.
1) Is there a proper way to do the same thing I have done?
I don't know if there is a defined proper way of showing errors. My take on showing errors is a litmis test. If the user can figure out how to fix the error based on what you have given them then it is good. If the user is confued by the error message then the message needs more work. Based on the examples given in the question, symbols were only char constants.
My favorite way of seeing errors is with the line with an arrow pointing at the location.
i.e.
Expected closing brace on line 6.
int a[6;
^
2) I want to replace CLOSSB, SEMICOL, CLOSB etc. with their real symbols. How can I do that using the map in .g file?
You will have to read the separately generated token file and then make a map, i.e. a dictionary data structure, to translate the token name into the token character(s).
EDIT
First we have to clarify what is meant by symbol. If you limit the definition of symbol to only tokens that are defined in the tokens file with a char or string then this can be done, i.e. '!'=13, or 'public'=92, if however you chose to use the definition of symbol to be any text associated with a token, then that is something other than what I was or plan to address.
When ANTLR generates its token map it uses three different sources:
The char or string constants in the lexer
The char or string constants in the parser.
Internal tokens such as Invalid, Down, Up
Since the tokens in the lexer are not the complete set, one should use the tokens file as a starting point. If you look at the tokens file you will note that the lowest value is 4. If you look at the TokenTypes file (This is the C# version name) you will find the remaining defined tokens.
If you find names like T__ in the tokens file, those are the names ANTLR generated for the char/string literals in the parser.
If you are using string and/or char literals in parser rules, then ANTLR must create a new set of lexer rules that include all of the string and/or char literals in the parser rules. Remember that the parser can only see tokens and not raw text. So string and/or char literals cannot be passed to the parser.
To see the new set of lexer rules, use org.antlr.Tool –Xsavelexer, and then open the created grammar file. The name may be like.g . If you have string and/or char literals in your parser rules you will see lexer rules with name starting with T .
Now that you know all of the tokens and their values you can create a mapping table from the info given in the error to the string you want to output instead for the symbol.
The code at http://markmail.org/message/2vtaukxw5kbdnhdv#query:+page:1+mid:2vtaukxw5kbdnhdv+state:results
is an example.
However the mapping of the tokens can change for such things as changing rules in the lexer or changing char/string literals in the parser. So if the message all of a sudden output the wrong string for a symbol you will have to update the mapping table by hand.
While this is not a perfect solution, it is a possible solution depending on how you define symbol.
Note: Last time I looked ANTLR 4.x creates the table automatically for access within the parser because it was such a problem for so many with ANTLR 3.x.
Bhathiya wrote:
*1) Is there a proper way to do the same thing I have done?
There is no single way to do this. Note that proper error-handling and reporting is tricky. Terence Parr spends a whole chapter on this in The Definitive ANTLR Reference (chapter 10). I recommend you get hold of a copy and read it.
Bhathiya wrote:
2) I want to replace CLOSSB, SEMICOL, CLOSB etc. with their real symbols. How can I do that using the map in .g file?
You can't. For SEMICOL this may seem easy to do, but how would you get this information for a token like FOO:
FOO : (X | Y)+;
fragment X : '4'..'6';
fragment Y : 'a' | 'bc' | . ;