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Encyclopedia > Flex lexical analyser

flex (fast lexical analyzer generator) is a free software alternative to Lex. It is frequently used with the free Bison parser generator. Flex was originally written in C by Vern Paxson around 1987. Lexical analysis is the process of taking an input string of characters (such as the source code of a computer program) and producing a sequence of symbols called lexical tokens, or just tokens, which may be handled more easily by a parser. ... This article is about free software as defined by the sociopolitical free software movement; for information on software distributed without charge, see freeware. ... lex is a program that generates lexical analyzers (scanners or lexers). Lex is commonly used with the yacc parser generator. ... GNU bison is a free parser generator computer program written for the GNU project, and available for virtually all common operating systems. ... A compiler-compiler or parser generator is a utility for generating the source code of a parser, interpreter or compiler from an annotated language description in the form of a grammar (usually in BNF) plus code that is associated with each of the rules of the grammar that should be... C is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system. ... Vern Paxson is an Internet researcher with interests ranging from transport protocols to intrusion detection and worms. ...


The description for flex as given by the flex manual:

"flex is a tool for generating scanners: programs which recognize lexical patterns in text. flex reads the given input files, or its standard input if no file names are given, for a description of a scanner to generate. The description is in the form of pairs of regular expressions and C code, called rules. flex generates as output a C source file, `lex.yy.c', which defines a routine `yylex()'. This file is compiled and linked with the `-lfl' library to produce an executable. When the executable is run, it analyzes its input for occurrences of the regular expressions. Whenever it finds one, it executes the corresponding C code..."

A similar lexical scanner for C++ is flex++. C++ (IPA pronounciation: ) is a general-purpose, high-level programming language with low-level facilities. ...


Flex is a non-GNU project, but the GNU project developed the manual for Flex. The GNU logo, drawn by Etienne Suvasa The GNU Project was announced in 1983 by Richard Stallman. ...


See also

free software Portal

Image File history File links Portal. ... lex is a program that generates lexical analyzers (scanners or lexers). Lex is commonly used with the yacc parser generator. ... Ragel is a finite state machine compiler with output support for C, C++, Objective-C and D source code. ... GNU bison is a free parser generator computer program written for the GNU project, and available for virtually all common operating systems. ...

External links

  • Flex Home Page
  • Flex Manual
  • Compiler Construction using Flex and Bison - course by Anthony Aaby A romanian rebuild version of this book in pdf format "fb2-press.pdf" or "fb2-printing.pdf" may be downloaded from [1] or directly from [2] or [3].
  • Download Win32 binaries of Flex and Bison
  • ANSI-C Lex Specification

  Results from FactBites:
 
Flex lexical analyser - Biocrawler (155 words)
The Flex lexical analyser generator is a free software alternative to Lex.
flex reads the given input files, or its standard input if no file names are given, for a description of a scanner to generate.
A simillar lexical scanner for C++ is flex++.
flex: The Fast Lexical Analyzer (226 words)
A scanner, sometimes called a tokenizer, is a program which recognizes lexical patterns in text.
The flex program reads user-specified input files, or its standard input if no file names are given, for a description of a scanner to generate.
Flex generates a C source file named, "lex.yy.c", which defines the function yylex().
  More results at FactBites »


 

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