I am new to ANTLR, and I am digging into it for a project. My work would require me to generate a parse tree from a source code file, convert the parse tree into a string that holds all the information about the parse tree in a somewhat "human-readable" form. Parts of this string (representing the parse tree) will then be modified, and the modified string will have to be converted to a changed source code.
I have found out that the .toStringTree(tree) method can be used in ANTLR to print out the tree in LISP format. Is there a better way to represent the parse tree as a string that holds all information?
Can the string-parse-tree be reverted back to the original source code (in the same language) using ANTLR? If no, are there any tools for this?
Can the string-parse-tree be reverted back to the original source code (in the same language) using ANTLR?
That string does not contain the token types, just the matched text. In other words: you cannot create a parse tree from the output of the ToStringTree. Besides, many ANTLR grammars have lexer rules that skip certain input (white spaces and line breaks, for example), so converting a parse tree back to the original input source is not always possible.
If no, are there any tools for this?
Without a doubt, I suggest you do a search on GitHub. But when you have the parse tree, it is trivial to create a custom tree structure and convert that to JSON.