JFlex User’s Manual - The Fast Lexical Analyser Generator

JFlex is a lexical analyser generator for Java written in Java. It is also a rewrite of the very useful tool JLex [3] which was developed by Elliot Berk at Princeton University. As Vern Paxson states for his C/C++ tool flex [11]: they do not share any code though.

The main design goals of JFlex are:
• Full unicode support
• Fast generated scanners
• Fast scanner generation
• Convenient specification syntax
• Platform independence
• JLex compatibility

This manual gives a brief but complete description of the tool JFlex. It assumes that you are familiar with the issue of lexical analysis. The references [1], [2], and [13] provide a good introduction to this topic.

The next section of this manual describes installation procedures for JFlex. If you never worked with JLex or just want to compare a JLex and a JFlex scanner specification you should also read Working with JFlex - an example (section 3). All options and the complete specification syntax are presented in Lexical specifications (section 4); Encodings, Platforms, and Unicode (section 5) provides information about scanning text vs. binary files. If you are interested in performance considerations and comparing JLex with JFlex speed, a few words on performance (section 6) might be just right for you. Those who want to use their old JLex specifications may want to check out section 7.1 Porting from JLex to avoid possible problems with not portable or non standard JLex behaviour that has been fixed in JFlex. Section 7.2 talks about porting scanners from the Unix tools lex and flex. Interfacing JFlex scanners with the LALR parser generators CUP and BYacc/J is explained in working together (section 8). Section 9 Bugs gives a list of currently known active bugs. The manual concludes with notes about Copying and License (section 10) and references.

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