How do I use ANTLR v3 from the command line?

Owned by TerenceP
Last updated: Feb 21, 2009Version comment
3 min read

You can run ANTLRWorks and tell it to generate the output code or you can run ANTLR directly from the commandline with:

$ java -jar antlr-3.1.2.jar mygrammar.g

or

$ java -cp antlr-3.1.2.jar org.antlr.Tool mygrammar.g

Better yet, add the jar antlr-3.1.2.jar to your CLASSPATH.

Running ANTLR with no parameters shows you:

usage: java org.antlr.Tool [args] file.g [file2.g file3.g ...]
  -o outputDir          specify output directory where all output is generated
  -fo outputDir         same as -o but force even files with relative paths to dir
  -lib dir              specify location of token files
  -depend               generate file dependencies
  -report               print out a report about the grammar(s) processed
  -print                print out the grammar without actions
  -debug                generate a parser that emits debugging events
  -profile              generate a parser that computes profiling information
  -nfa                  generate an NFA for each rule
  -dfa                  generate a DFA for each decision point
  -message-format name  specify output style for messages
  -verbose              generate ANTLR version and other information
  -X                    display extended argument list

For example, consider how to make the LL-star example from the examples tarball you can get at http://www.antlr.org/download/examples-v3.tar.gz.

$ cd examples-v3/java/LL-star
$ java org.antlr.Tool SimpleC.g
$ javac *.java

In above command, we are considering ANTLR3 jar lies in your classpath.

For input:

char c;
int x;
void bar(int x);
int foo(int y, char d) {
  int i;
  for (i=0; i<3; i=i+1) {
    x=3;
    y=5;
  }
}

you will see output as follows:

$ java Main input
bar is a declaration
foo is a definition

What if I want to test my parser without generating code? Easy. Just run ANTLR in interpreter mode. It can't execute your actions, but it can create a parse tree from your input to show you how it would be matched. Use the org.antlr.tool.Interp main class. In the following, I interpret simplec.g on t.c, which contains "int x;"

$ java org.antlr.tool.Interp simplec.g WS program t.c
( <grammar SimpleC>
  ( program
    ( declaration
      ( variable
        ( type [@0,0:2='int',<14>,1:0] )
        ( declarator [@2,4:4='x',<2>,1:4] )
        [@3,5:5=';',<5>,1:5]
      )
    )
  )
)

where I have formatted the output to make it more readable. I have told it to ignore all WS tokens.