To: Thomas Hadig <hadig@toots.physik.rwth-aachen.de>
Subject: Re: Flex Bug ?
In-reply-to: Your message of Tue, 26 Nov 1996 14:35:01 PST.
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 1996 11:15:05 PST
From: Vern Paxson <vern>

> In my lexer code, i have the line :
> ^\*.*          { }
>
> Thus all lines starting with an astrix (*) are comment lines.
> This does not work !

I can't get this problem to reproduce - it works fine for me.  Note
though that if what you have is slightly different:

	COMMENT	^\*.*
	%%
	{COMMENT}	{ }

then it won't work, because flex pushes back macro definitions enclosed
in ()'s, so the rule becomes

	(^\*.*)		{ }

and now that the '^' operator is not at the immediate beginning of the
line, it's interpreted as just a regular character.  You can avoid this
behavior by using the "-l" lex-compatibility flag, or "%option lex-compat".

		Vern