Slight variation in production leads to "backwards" display

[vsajip]

The following production

key_value ::= ( key ( ':' | '=' ) value ( ',' | EOL )? EOL* )*

leads to diagram

However, adding EOL* to the beginning of the production

key_value ::= EOL* ( key ( ':' | '=' ) value ( ',' | EOL )? EOL* )*

leads to

which, while not wrong, can confuse the reader because of the right-to-left ordering of key and value in the diagram. Is there a workaround for this? I tried changing some of the options but nothing caused left-to-right display of key and value.

[GuntherRademacher]

RR tries to detect repetitions with separators, and it comes up here with an empty repeated part, with everything else as the separator. This depends on the order of left- and right-factoring steps, and there is no way to influence this, but rephrasing the production. In this case you will get the desired result, if you put EOL* first in the original repetition, rather than last:

key_value ::= ( EOL* key ( ':' | '=' ) value ','? )* EOL* 

But what I would probably do is separate the key value pair from the repetion into separate productions:

key_value_pairs ::= EOL* ( key_value_pair EOL* )*
key_value_pair ::= key ( ':' | '=' ) value ','?