LAB SESSION 1

INTRODUCTION TO ANTLRWORKS

1. OBJECTIVE
The objectives of Lab 1 are (1) to play with the ANTLRWorks tool; (2) to construct a
simple lexer with few regular expressions on ANTLRWorks;

2. INTRODUCTION

ANTLRWorks (lastest released version of the legendary ANTLR tool) is a powerful tool
for those who want to develop a language compiler quickly and stably. To download via
https://www.antlr3.org/works/
JRE: https://www.java.com/download/manual.jsp
Download and run ANTLRWorks, example: java -jar antlrworks-1.5.2-complete.jar

3. EXPERIMENT

3.1 Run ANTLR

According to the lab setting, tutor will guide student how to run the pre-installed
ANTLRWorks. Once launched, an interface will show up as illustrated in Figure 1. For
convenient referring, the four sub-panels of the interface are labeled as Panel-1, Panel-2,
Panel-3 and Panel-4 as indicated by the red numbers.
 Figure 1 – ANTLRWorks interface.

3.2 The first regular expression

Students will perform the following steps:

- Select Interpreter tab in Panel-3

- Type the following regular expression (RE) in Panel-2:

A : 'a'|'bc';

(do not forget the semicolon)

When done correctly, the drop-box associated with the left-arrow symbol in Panel-3 will
display the first available item (‘A”) as depicted in Figure 2.

Figure 2 – Regular Expression.

You may want to test your RE by typing an input string in Panel-3 and then press the left-
arrow to observe the result. A red message will inform you that there is an error
occurring. Switch to Console tab in Panel-3 to observe the error. It is likely that a lexer
is missing.

3.2 The first lexer

You must define a grammar before generating a lexer.

In order to define a grammar, just simply type the following command in the beginning
of Panel-2:

grammar <grammarName>;

(feel free to assign any value for the variable grammarName)

After defining a grammar, the next step is to declare your lexer, meaning that you will
type the command as follows:

@lexer::header {package test;};

(I still do not fully understand the meaning of header directive, but at least it works for
now. We will together investigate its meaning later.)

When done, your Panel-2 should look like that in Figure 3.

Figure 3 – The first lexer.

3.3 Test your lexer

You can input your test string in Panel-3 to check if your lexer works normally. If your
inputted string matches with the RE (e.g. “a” or “bc”), Panel-4 will display a tree, which
basically indicates that a pattern of A has been successfully recognized. Figure 4
illustrated a case of recognizing the input string of “bc”. Otherwise, an “error tree” will
be shown instead, as presented in Figure 5.
 Figure 4 – A pattern successfully recognized.

Figure 5 – Oops, something wrong lah!

3.4 Lexer with multiple REs

You can generate a lexer with multiple REs defined, as depicted in Figure 6. Just to
remember to choose a desired pattern rule before testing a given string.

Figure 6 – Multi-RE lexer.

4. CLASS EXERCISES

4.1. Play with the following REs, check them with some right and wrong patterns.

a) A: ('a'|'bc')*;

b) B: '1' ('1'|'0 ')* '0 ';

c)

C: '0'|'1'|'2'|'3'|'4'|'5'|'6'|'7'|'8'|'9';

D: C+;

4.2 Construct REs recognizing the following patterns:

a). A year in the 17th century (e.g. 1760)

b) A Vietnam mobile phone number, which is of the following forms: 09XXXXXXXX

or 849XXXXXXXX or +849XXXXXXXX

5. SUBMISSIONS

Students are required to submit in writing to the tutor-in-charge the following materials:

5.1 The trees generated by ANTLRWorks with the following REs and inputs

RE input

4.1a abcaabc

4.1b 11010

4.1c (D selected) 167340

5.2 The REs for exercises 4.2