ANTLR
ANTLR (ANother Tool for Language Recognition) is an open source parser generator for reading, processing, executing, or translating structured text or binary files. It's useful for building languages, tools, and frameworks.
ANTLR (Parser Generator for Language Recognition)
ANTLR (ANother Tool for Language Recognition) is an open source parser generator for reading, processing, executing, or translating structured text or binary files. It's useful for building languages, tools, and frameworks.
What is ANTLR?
ANTLR (ANother Tool for Language Recognition) is a powerful parser generator for reading, processing, executing, or translating structured text or binary files. Here is an overview:
- Open source software tool for building languages, tools, and frameworks
- Implemented in Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, C++, and other languages
- Generates lexical analyzers and parsers from grammar descriptions
- Useful for processing domain-specific languages created for a specific purpose
- Allows handling of formats like JSON, XML, CSV, configuration files, network packets, and more
- Output can automate tasks like syntax highlighting, language translation, documentation generation, and serialization
- Grammars can target tree parsers or LL(*) parsers for fast lexical analysis
- Active open source community providing plugins, IDE integration, and other resources
- Used by companies, open source projects, and academic research around the world
In summary, ANTLR is an industry-standard tool for parsing and manipulating text-based content across many languages and platforms, widely used to recognize and process custom domain languages.
ANTLR Features
Features
- Generates lexical analyzers and parsers from grammar descriptions
- Supports multiple target languages like Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, Go, C++, Swift
- Generates parse trees/ASTs for parsed input
- Performs syntax validation and error reporting
- Built-in runtime library for tree parsing/walking
Pricing
- Open Source
Pros
Wide language support
Active community
Easy to learn and use
Good documentation
Flexible and extensible
Cons
Can have a steep learning curve
Limited debugging capabilities
Not ideal for complex grammars
Generated code can be hard to understand
Official Links
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