Which is the best counterpart to ANTLR to create parsers in ruby?

Question

I've used antlr and javacc/freecc for a while. Now I need to write a bunch of parsers using antlr grammars but such parsers need to be written in ruby lang.

I googled but nothing found. Is there any ruby parser generator that takes antlr grammars and create a parser? If there are many, which is the best one in your opinion?

TIA Paolo

Impatience

Answer 1

You could also generate the parser with ANTLR for Java or C and call it from your Ruby program with JRuby or FFI.

This should also give you a performance boost which might be a big advantage if you have a lot of input to parse.

Balls

ahe, that's exactly what I choose to do. I fired up a new project (github.com/thesp0nge/mirage) concerning all stuff about parsing source code. I'll write mirage in C using antlr and then I'll call it from Ruby. For anyone interested, this is for a major rewrite for the Owasp Orizon project, a static source code analyzer I'm writing (github.com/thesp0nge/owasp-orizon) – Impatience

Answer 2

1. You might get away easy by using JRuby and keeping your ANTLR parsers in java.
2. If PEGs are enough for your job, treetop and the newer citrus are common tools used by rubyists.
3. Other parsers I dug while researching for a project are: peggy, Kanocc, Racc.

For my project I chosed treetop (citrus was not born yet).

Entoderm

Answer 3

Why not to use ANTLR Ruby: http://www.antlr.org/wiki/display/ANTLR3/Antlr3RubyTarget (http://split-s.blogspot.com/2005/12/antlr-for-ruby.html)

There is also some beta here: http://rubyforge.org/projects/antlr3/

Pilcomayo

Shame on me. I didn't check the proper place first... the gem community. Thank you so much :-) – Impatience

Note that the Ruby target shipped with ANTLR 3.4 is quite broken. If there are any issues with the gem, the head revision of the project on GitHub appears to work ok: github.com/ohboyohboyohboy/antlr3 – Excurrent