Does the PGN specification mistakenly omit solidus (/) for symbol tokens?

Question

The Portable Game Notation (PGN) specification appears to contradict itself regarding the valid characters that may appear in a symbol token.

From [1], section 7, quote:

A symbol token starts with a letter or digit character and is immediately followed by a sequence of zero or more symbol continuation characters. These continuation characters are letter characters ("A-Za-z"), digit characters ("0-9"), the underscore ("_"), the plus sign ("+"), the octothorpe sign ("#"), the equal sign ("="), the colon (":"), and the hyphen ("-") ...

Or, to put it more concisely, a symbol token conforms to the regular expression /^[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9_+#=:-]*/.

However, this definition explicitly precludes the game draw termination marker 1/2-1/2. Quoting again from [1], section 8.2.6:

Each movetext section has exactly one game termination marker; the marker always occurs as the last element in the movetext. The game termination marker is a symbol that is one of the following four values: "1-0" (White wins), "0-1" (Black wins), "1/2-1/2" (drawn game), and "*" (game in progress, result unknown, or game abandoned).

The string "1/2-1/2" very obviously does not meet the definition of a symbol token, so either:

a) the solidus character ('/', 0x2f) should have been included in the definition of symbol continuation characters, but the author failed to do so, or;

b) game termination markers should not be considered symbol tokens, but rather a distinct type of token which is separate from symbol tokens, and the author failed to indicate this, or;

c) I have completely misunderstood the wording of the specification, and am an idiot.

Somebody has screwed up here, and either it's me, or it's Steven J. Edwards. Hopefully it's me. Personally I think (a) is the most likely of the three but perhaps I've missed something.

[1] http://www.saremba.de/chessgml/standards/pgn/pgn-complete.htm

Answer 1

You are right, the text as written there isn't exactly correct.

It also says that the marker is a symbol and lists * as one of the options, even though * is a token on its own and also cannot occur in a symbol.

That said, the meaning is clear enough, 1/2-1/2 is a valid termination marker. How you solve this in your code is up to you. As it's hard to add 1/2-1/2 as a token on its own (would need lookahead to disambiguate it from symbol 1 et cetera), it's probably easiest to add '/' to the possible symbol characters, yes.

Answer 2

I agree the spec is ambiguous. This antlr grammar uses your option b

game termination markers should not be considered symbol tokens, but rather a distinct type of token which is separate from symbol tokens, and the author failed to indicate this

In the grammar I find

SYMBOL
: [a-zA-Z0-9] [a-zA-Z0-9_+#=:-]*
;

separate from termination

game_termination
 : WHITE_WINS
 | BLACK_WINS
 | DRAWN_GAME
 | ASTERISK
 ;