CODEWITHSUNDEEP
antlrantlr4
C. Porto
C. Porto

Reputation: 673

ANTLR4 No Viable Alternative At Input

I'm implementing a simple PseudoCode language with ANTLR4, this is my current grammar:

// Define a grammar called PseudoCode
grammar PseudoCode;
prog : FUNCTION SIGNATURE '(' ')'
        | FUNCTION SIGNATURE '{' VARB '}' ;

param: VARB | VARB ',' param ;

assignment: VARB '=' NUMBER ;

FUNCTION: 'function' ;
VARB: [a-z0-9]+ ;
SIGNATURE: [a-zA-Z0-9]+ ;
NUMBER: [0-9]+ | [0-9]+ '.' [0-9]+ ;

WS: [ \t\r\n]+ -> skip ;

The problem is after compiling and generating the Parser, Lexer, etc... and then running with grun PseudoCode prog -tree with the input being for example: function bla{bleh}

I keep on getting the following error:

line 1:9 no viable alternative at input 'functionbla'

Can someone point out what is wrong with my grammar?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1098

Answers (1)

sepp2k
sepp2k

Reputation: 370415

bla is a VARB, not a SIGNATURE, because it matches both rules and VARB comes first in the grammar. The way you defined your lexer rules, an identifier can only be matched as a SIGNATURE if it contains capital letters.

The simplest solution to this problem would be to have a single lexer rule for identifiers and then use that everywhere where you currently use SIGNATURE or VARB. If you want to disallow capital letters in certain places, you could simply check for this condition in an action or listener, which would also allow you to produce clearer error messages than syntax errors (e.g. "capital letters are not allowed in variable names").

If you absolutely do need capital letters in variable names to be syntax errors, you could define one rule for identifiers with capital letters and one without. Then you could use ID_WITH_CAPITALS | ID_LOWER_CASE_ONLY in places where you want to allow both and ID_LOWER_CASE_ONLY in cases where you only want to allow lower case letters.

PS: You'll also want to make sure that your identifier rule does not match numbers (which both VARB and SIGNATURE currently do). Currently NUMBER tokens will only be generated for numbers with a decimal point.

Upvotes: 1

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