ANTLR v4

ANTLR (ANother Tool for Language Recognition) is a powerful parser generator for reading, processing, executing, or translating structured text or binary files. It's widely used to build languages, tools, and frameworks. From a grammar, ANTLR generates a parser that can build parse trees and also generates a listener interface (or visitor) that makes it easy to respond to the recognition of phrases of interest.

Given day-job constraints, my time working on this project is limited so I'll have to focus first on fixing bugs rather than changing/improving the feature set. Likely I'll do it in bursts every few months. Please do not be offended if your bug or pull request does not yield a response! --parrt

Authors and major contributors

• Terence Parr, parrt@cs.usfca.edu ANTLR project lead and supreme dictator for life University of San Francisco
• Sam Harwell (Tool co-author, Java and C# target)
• Eric Vergnaud (Javascript, Python2, Python3 targets and significant work on C# target)
• Peter Boyer (Go target)
• Mike Lischke (C++ completed target)
• Dan McLaughlin (C++ initial target)
• David Sisson (C++ initial target and test)
• Janyou (Swift target)
• Ewan Mellor, Hanzhou Shi (Swift target merging)
• Ben Hamilton (Full Unicode support in serialized ATN and all languages' runtimes for code points > U+FFFF)
• Marcos Passos (PHP target)
• Lingyu Li (Dart target)

Useful information

• Release notes
• Getting started with v4
• Official site
• Documentation
• FAQ
• ANTLR code generation targets
  (Currently: Java, C#, Python2|3, JavaScript, Go, C++, Swift)
• Java API
• ANTLR v3
• v3 to v4 Migration, differences

You might also find the following pages useful, particularly if you want to mess around with the various target languages.

• How to build ANTLR itself
• How we create and deploy an ANTLR release

The Definitive ANTLR 4 Reference

Programmers run into parsing problems all the time. Whether it’s a data format like JSON, a network protocol like SMTP, a server configuration file for Apache, a PostScript/PDF file, or a simple spreadsheet macro language—ANTLR v4 and this book will demystify the process. ANTLR v4 has been rewritten from scratch to make it easier than ever to build parsers and the language applications built on top. This completely rewritten new edition of the bestselling Definitive ANTLR Reference shows you how to take advantage of these new features.

You can buy the book The Definitive ANTLR 4 Reference at amazon or an electronic version at the publisher's site.

You will find the Book source code useful.

Additional grammars

This repository is a collection of grammars without actions where the root directory name is the all-lowercase name of the language parsed by the grammar. For example, java, cpp, csharp, c, etc...