Investigation of Lexical Analysis Phase with JFlex

Abstract

Lexical analysis is the initial part of reading and analyzing the program text in the compilation process. Its main task is to read input characters and produce as output a sequence of tokens that parser uses for syntax analysis. To aid the language developer, generating lexers for general purpose programming languages by using the fast lexical analyser generator, JFlex is investigated in this paper. This paper is described how to write a lexical specification file by using the regular expression notations of JFlex. And then, the results of scanner generation for the whole lexical structure of Java and C++ languages are described.