In lex, how do I begin in a state??

In lex, one uses BEGIN STATE-NAME in an action to place lex in a
state. My question is: how do I begin in a state?? That is, have
a state in effect before any input is read.


Thanks,


Jim Cadwell cadwell@sumax.seattleu.edu
[In short, you have to execute a BEGIN before the lexer starts scanning.
Code put at the front of the rules section is run whenever you call yylex(),
so you could do something like this:


%%
%{
static int first_time = 1;


if(first_time) {
BEGIN FOOSTATE;
first_time = 0;
}
...


The new version of O'Reilly's lex&yacc, much of which I wrote, explains this
in more detail. -John]
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