C#/.NET Lexer Generators

Question

I'm looking for a decent lexical scanner generator for C#/.NET -- something that supports Unicode character categories, and generates somewhat readable & efficient code. Anyone know of one?

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EDIT: I need support for Unicode categories, not just Unicode characters. There are currently 1421 characters in just the Lu (Letter, Uppercase) category alone, and I need to match many different categories very specifically, and would rather not hand-write the character sets necessary for it.

Also, actual code is a must -- this rules out things that generate a binary file that is then used with a driver (i.e. GOLD)

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EDIT: ANTLR does not support Unicode categories yet. There is an open issue for it, though, so it might fit my needs someday.

Answer 1

GPLEX seems to support your requirements.

Answer 2

The two solutions that come to mind are ANTLR and Gold. ANTLR has a GUI based grammar designer, and an excellent sample project in C# can be found here.

Answer 3

I agree with @David Robbins, ANTLR is probably your best bet. However, the generated ANTLR code does need a seperate runtime library in order to use the generated code because there are some string parsing and other library commonalities that the generated code relies on. ANTLR generates a lexer AND a parser.

On a side note: ANTLR is great...I wrote a 400+ line grammar to generate over 10k or C# code to efficiently parse a language. This included built in error checking for every possible thing that could go wrong in the parsing of the language. Try to do that by hand, and you'll never keep up with the bugs.