1 This is flex, the fast lexical analyzer generator.
3 flex is a tool for generating scanners: programs which recognize
4 lexical patterns in text.
6 More information about flex as well as the latest official release of
9 http://flex.sourceforge.net/
11 Bug reports should be submitted using the SourceForge Bug Tracker for
14 http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=97492&atid=618177
16 The flex codebase is kept in git at:
18 https://github.com/westes/flex
20 There are several mailing lists available as well:
22 flex-announce@lists.sourceforge.net - where posts will be made
23 announcing new releases of flex.
25 flex-help@lists.sourceforge.net - where you can post questions about
28 flex-devel@lists.sourceforge.net - where you can discuss development of
31 Find information on subscribing to the mailing lists at:
33 http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=97492
35 The flex distribution contains the following files which may be of interest:
39 NEWS - current version number and list of user-visible changes.
41 INSTALL - basic installation information.
43 ABOUT-NLS - description of internationalization support in flex.
45 COPYING - flex's copyright and license.
47 doc/ - user documentation.
49 examples/ - containing examples of some possible flex scanners and a
50 few other things. See the file examples/README for more details.
52 TODO - outstanding bug reports, desired features, etc.
54 tests/ - regression tests. See TESTS/README for details.
56 po/ - internationalization support files.
58 You need the following tools to build flex from the maintainer's
61 compiler suite - flex is built with gcc
62 bash, or a good Bourne-style shell
63 m4 - m4 -p needs to work; GNU m4 and a few others are suitable
64 GNU bison; to generate parse.c from parse.y
65 autoconf 2.69; for handling the build system
66 automake 1.12.2; for Makefile generation
67 gettext 0.18; fori18n support
68 help2man 1.36; to generate the flex man page
69 tar, gzip, etc.; for packaging of the source distribution
70 GNU texinfo 498; to build and test the flex manual
71 GNU indent 2.8; for indenting the flex source the way we want it done
73 Once you have all the necessary tools installed, life becomes
74 simple. To prepare the flex tree for building, run the script:
78 in the top level of the flex source tree.
79 This script calls the various tools needed to get flex ready for the
80 GNU-style configure script to be able to work.
82 From this point on, building flex follows the usual configure, make,
85 This file is part of flex.
87 This code is derived from software contributed to Berkeley by
90 The United States Government has rights in this work pursuant
91 to contract no. DE-AC03-76SF00098 between the United States
92 Department of Energy and the University of California.
94 Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
95 modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
98 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
99 notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
100 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
101 notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
102 documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
104 Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors
105 may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software
106 without specific prior written permission.
108 THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR
109 IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED
110 WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR