antlr4/java: pretty print parse tree to stdout

Question

Beginners question: how do I print a readable version of the parse tree to stdout?

CharStream input = CharStreams.fromFileName("testdata/test.txt");
MyLexer lexer = new MyLexer(input);
CommonTokenStream tokens = new CommonTokenStream(lexer);
MyParser parser = new MyParser(tokens);     
parser.setBuildParseTree(true);
RuleContext tree = parser.record();
System.out.println(tree.toStringTree(parser));

this prints the whole tree on a single line delimited by brackets '()'.

(record (husband <4601>   (name KOHAI   Nikolaus) \n (birth *   um.1872   (place Ploschitz)) \n\n) (wife      (marriage oo) \n      (name SCHLOTTHAUER   Maria) \n      (birth *   um.1877  
...

I would like to have something like this

record 
  husband
    <id>
    name
       <name>
...
  wife

Answer 1

Extracted from SnippetsTest as a standalone utility class:

import java.util.List;

import org.antlr.v4.runtime.misc.Utils;
import org.antlr.v4.runtime.tree.Tree;
import org.antlr.v4.runtime.tree.Trees;

public class TreeUtils {

    /** Platform dependent end-of-line marker */
    public static final String Eol = System.lineSeparator();
    /** The literal indent char(s) used for pretty-printing */
    public static final String Indents = "  ";
    private static int level;

    private TreeUtils() {}

    /**
     * Pretty print out a whole tree. {@link #getNodeText} is used on the node payloads to get the text
     * for the nodes. (Derived from Trees.toStringTree(....))
     */
    public static String toPrettyTree(final Tree t, final List<String> ruleNames) {
        level = 0;
        return process(t, ruleNames).replaceAll("(?m)^\\s+$", "").replaceAll("\\r?\\n\\r?\\n", Eol);
    }

    private static String process(final Tree t, final List<String> ruleNames) {
        if (t.getChildCount() == 0) return Utils.escapeWhitespace(Trees.getNodeText(t, ruleNames), false);
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        sb.append(lead(level));
        level++;
        String s = Utils.escapeWhitespace(Trees.getNodeText(t, ruleNames), false);
        sb.append(s + ' ');
        for (int i = 0; i < t.getChildCount(); i++) {
            sb.append(process(t.getChild(i), ruleNames));
        }
        level--;
        sb.append(lead(level));
        return sb.toString();
    }

    private static String lead(int level) {
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        if (level > 0) {
            sb.append(Eol);
            for (int cnt = 0; cnt < level; cnt++) {
                sb.append(Indents);
            }
        }
        return sb.toString();
    }
}

Call the method as follows:

List<String> ruleNamesList = Arrays.asList(parser.getRuleNames());
String prettyTree = TreeUtils.toPrettyTree(tree, ruleNamesList);

Answer 2

Besides a graphical parse tree my ANTLR4 extension for Visual Studio Code also produces a formatted text parse tree:

Answer 3

If you like to use regex only for what it's really for, you can always print a tree by yourself:

import org.antlr.v4.runtime.Parser;
import org.antlr.v4.runtime.ParserRuleContext;
import org.antlr.v4.runtime.tree.ParseTree;
import org.antlr.v4.runtime.tree.Trees;

public static String printSyntaxTree(Parser parser, ParseTree root) {
    StringBuilder buf = new StringBuilder();
    recursive(root, buf, 0, Arrays.asList(parser.getRuleNames()));
    return buf.toString();
}

private static void recursive(ParseTree aRoot, StringBuilder buf, int offset, List<String> ruleNames) {
    for (int i = 0; i < offset; i++) {
        buf.append("  ");
    }
    buf.append(Trees.getNodeText(aRoot, ruleNames)).append("\n");
    if (aRoot instanceof ParserRuleContext) {
        ParserRuleContext prc = (ParserRuleContext) aRoot;
        if (prc.children != null) {
            for (ParseTree child : prc.children) {
                recursive(child, buf, offset + 1, ruleNames);
            }
        }
    }
}

Usage:

ParseTree root = parser.yourOwnRule();
System.out.println(printSyntaxTree(parser, root));