Parsing multiple C source files

Question

I have multiple C source files and respective header files. I am trying to parse these files using a compiler, eg ANTLR. In ANTLR parser grammar, you can define your header files using the

@parser::includes
{#include"a.h"}

You can start parsing the first file eg

CommonTree tree = Parser.start("a.c"); 

and parser will parse the header file

a.h 

but how to parse the files if you have multiple source file egbc, cc and so on with their respective header files.

Answer 1

C is a pig to parse --- the semantic type of a token depends on what it's been declared as. Consider:

T(*b)[4]

If T is a type name, then this is a variable declaration. If it's an identifier, it's a functional call. In order to resolve this, any C parser that expects to actually work is going to have to keep a full type environment, which means it needs to be an unpleasantly large chunk of a C compiler.

There are ANTLR parsers for C that get all this stuff right but they're not trivial to use and I don't have any experience of them, so can't comment there.

Instead you might want to go look at using external tools to parse your C into something that's easier to deal with. gcc-xml is one such; it uses gcc itself to parse source files and then spit out XML that's much easier to handle.