Getting started with ANTLR in C++

ANTLR is a great tool to quickly create parsers and help you in working with a known language or create your DSL. While the tool itself is written in Java it can also be used to generate parsers in several other languages, for instance Python, C#, Javascript, C++, etc.

This example shows how to parse a data format file with ANTLR in C++.

The project can run on Windows, Linux and Mac. To build it you need CMake installed on your system. On Windows you need a version of Visual Studio that include support for C++.

To solve many common issues with C++ building on different platforms this project is now based on the CMake script from the official ANTLR4 Cpp Runtime. This should deal with many typical issues in building a C++ projects on different setups and platforms. However, be warned that this will download the ANTLR C++ runtime from the official git repository and will build it. Therefore build time for the first build will be long.

# create a build directory to keep the main one clean
mkdir build
cd build
# to run CMake
cmake ../
# to build on Linux and Mac
make
# run the executable
./antlr4-tutorial
# to build and run on Windows
# open the "Antlr-cpp-tutorial.sln" file with Visual Studio generate by CMake inside the build directory
# build and run the project antlr-tutorial (do not select the auto-generated ALL_BUILD)

The CMake build script will also generate the ANTLR parser automatically. However, you may want to generate the parser manually during development with this command:

# generate the ANTLR components (you have to setup ANTLR in your system, before performing this step)
antlr4 -Dlanguage=Cpp -no-listener -visitor -o libs Scene.g4

You can read an article on the example on Getting started with ANTLR in C++