Re: Inquiry about nfa output by flex

Vern Paxson <vern@icir.org>
31 Aug 2005 00:34:42 -0400

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Related articles
Re: Inquiry about nfa output by flex vern@icir.org (Vern Paxson) (2005-08-05)
Re: Inquiry about nfa output by flex bharath.bhushan@gmail.com (bharath) (2005-08-10)
Re: Inquiry about nfa output by flex vern@icir.org (Vern Paxson) (2005-08-31)
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From: Vern Paxson <vern@icir.org>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 31 Aug 2005 00:34:42 -0400
Organization: Compilers Central
Keywords: lex
Posted-Date: 31 Aug 2005 00:34:42 EDT

> The -1 character class is "." i believe.
>
> What is the -2 character class ?


Actually, it looks from -T output that I didn't state that correctly.
-1 is the first character class in the input, -2 the second, etc.,
and then the match-any character class is created for the default
rule, so it'll be -n if you have n-1 explicit character classes.


> If I have a regular expression like
>
> ((~[A-Z][0-9A-Za-z\&\.\-\, ]+~(N|J)[^~]*~[0-9]+~)+~[0-9A-Za-z\
> \$\&\.\-\,]+~[^~]*MAKE[^~]*~[0-9]+~)
>
> I get character classes -1 to -7 in the nfa output by flex


Hmmmm, I get -1 to -6.


> To verify this, I wrote a simple regular expression with a single dot
> i.e,
>
> .
>
> And I got two character classes in the NFA output by flex : -1 and -2.
> What is character class does -2 represent ?


-1 is '.' and -2 is the equivalent of '.|\n'.


Vern



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