What does the dot character actually match?

[Thomas Beale]

In the Antlr4 book it says that the '.' character matches any character. However, the rule

regex1: ( '\\' . | ~'/' )+ ;

doesn't appear to match the literal '\.' (backslash, dot) within a regex string, but 

regex1: ( '\\.' | '\\' . | ~'/' )+ ;

does, according to my tests with the plugin in IntelliJ.

What's going on?

[Jim Idle]

You are using . In a parser rule. Parser rules do not match characters, they match tokens, so that means match any token.

Jim

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[Thomas Beale]

Aha. When I first tried that rule (not using a lexer token name, as the rest of the grammar does) I had assumed that it would not even be legal. But the plug-in allows it and then I wrongly understood that to mean that there was some kind of 'in-rule lexing' going on.

I'm still new to Antlr after years of yacc/lex..!

thanks for the steer.