Hi everyone,
I'm new to the list and new to ANTLR. I have a specific problem I need to solve
and I hope ANTLR can help.
Our client has several end-customers who all have slightly different document
formats used for data interchange.
All the documents are basically 'standard' EDI documents, meaning they have the
same basic syntax. However, some customers will use a '+' to separate values,
some will use '*', others will use '~', etc. (I'm reminded of the old saying,
"The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from!")
So, basically, the following inputs are all basically the same, except for the
character used to separate tokens:
FST*4290*D*W*20070607
FST+4290+D+W+20070607
FST~4290~D~W~20070607
The thing is, we don't know ahead of time which separator characters might be
used in the future, and we need to be able to tweak each end-customer's file
format without re-compiling the lexer/parser. For example, a year from now
there might be a customer who decides to use '_' or '$' or whatever, and we
need to provide our client with a simple way (e.g. a per-customer configuration
file) to customize the lexer/parser for such situations, without
re-generating/re-compiling.
So, is this possible with ANTLR? How would I do this? Would it require a custom
Lexer subclass with constructor parameters (e.g. new CustomLexer('_')) or
something? How would this mesh with the generated lexer code from ANTLR?
I'm quite new to tools such as ANTLR (and parsers in general), so any help
would be much appreciated. I really don't know where to start with this
problem. For a hand-coded parser it's fairly simple, but I don't know enough
about the workings of ANTLR to see where I would need to tweak it.
Thanks,
Rob
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