error with bison

Question

I have a simple rule in my grammar which looks for sequence of whitespaces:

    ws: ws|' ';

When bison sees this rule, it complains:

warning: rule useless in parser due to conflicts: ws: ws

Why it is so? Cant I have a simple rule in grammar which looks for a regex?

I would use the lexer to get all adjacent white space rather than the parser. — Martin York

Andre Holzner Andre Holzner · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-18T07:42:00

what you are declaring is 'ws is ws or ws is a space', not 'ws is one or more spaces'.

If you want the latter, try something like:

ws:   ' '
    | ' ' ws;