title: Handling blank lines when White Space is important in ANTLR4
body: <p>This may be a newbee question, since I don't have a lot of ANTLR experience, but I've done a lot of research and troubleshooting and have not found a solution so resorting to asking. I am trying to write a parser for a very odd format file (PCGEN open source role playing game character editor) that I plan to use for several uses, not the least of which is learning ANTLR. I am to the point that I have everything I want working on the LEX and Parse, except that it stops parsing when it hits blank lines. I know I could add a line to throw away all whitespace, but the file format is such that strings are not really quoted, and white space is usually important, so the only white space that should be ignored is a totally blank line. When I run the Lexer it gives the tokens for the entire file, so I thought the Parser would process the tokens without concern for where they came from, so I am missing something simple. Here is the beggining of my input:</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <pre><code>PCGVERSION:2.0
  
  # System Information
  CAMPAIGN:Advanced Player's Guide|CAMPAIGN:Ultimate Magic|CAMPAIGN:Ultimate Combat
  VERSION:6.07.05
  ROLLMETHOD:3|EXPRESSION:2d6+6
  PURCHASEPOINTS:N
  </code></pre>
  
  <hr>
  
  <h2>And this is my current grammar:</h2>
  
  <pre><code>grammar PCG;
  
  pcgFile     :   lines=line+;
  
  line        :   statement (NEWLINE | EOF)
              ;
  
  statement   :   KEYWORD ASSIGN
              |   KEYWORD ASSIGN YES_NO
              |   KEYWORD ASSIGN TEXT
              |   KEYWORD ASSIGN VERSIONNUM
              |   KEYWORD ( ASSIGN INT )+
              |   KEYWORD ASSIGN INT
              |   KEYWORD ASSIGN SUB_START statement SUB_END
              |   statement SEP statement
              ;
  
  
  NEWLINE         :       '\r\n' | 'r' | '\n' ; 
  YES_NO          :       ('Y'|'N');
  KEYWORD         :       [A-Z]+; 
  INT             :       [0-9]+; 
  TEXT            :       ~(':'|'|'|'\r'|'\n'|'['|']')+; 
  ASSIGN          :       ':'; 
  SEP             :       '|';
  
  COMMENT         :       '#' ~[\r\n]*-&gt;skip ; 
  VERSIONNUM      :       ([0-9]+ ('.' [0-9]+)?)
                  |       ('.' [0-9]+)
                  |       ([0-9]+ ('.' [0-9]+) ('.' [0-9]+)?)
                  ; 
  
  ROLL            :       INT [dD] INT (('+'|'-') INT)?;
  
  SUB_START       :       '['; 
  SUB_END         :       ']';
  </code></pre>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>Any help would be appreciated.</p>