The Flex lexical analyser 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.

The description for flex as given by the flex manual:

"flex is a tool for generating scanners: programs which recognized 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++.

Flex is a non-GNU project, but the GNU project developed the manual for Flex.

See also

• Lex

External links

• Flex Manual
• Compiler Construction using Flex and Bison - course by Anthony Aaby
• Building Flex using Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 and Visual Studio .Net

Free compilers and interpreters | Parsers

Flex | Flex (GNU) | Flex