How to make lex/flex recognize tokens not separated by whitespace?

Question

I'm taking a course in compiler construction, and my current assignment is to write the lexer for the language we're implementing. I can't figure out how to satisfy the requirement that the lexer must recognize concatenated tokens. That is, tokens not separated by whitespace. E.g.: the string 39if is supposed to be recognized as the number 39 and the keyword if. Simultaneously, the lexer must also exit(1) when it encounters invalid input.

A simplified version of the code I have:

%{
#include <stdio.h>
%}

%option main warn debug

%%

if      |
then    |
else    printf("keyword: %s\n", yytext);

[[:digit:]]+    printf("number: %s\n", yytext);

[[:alpha:]][[:alnum:]]*     printf("identifier: %s\n", yytext);

[[:space:]]+    // skip whitespace
[[:^space:]]+   { printf("ERROR: %s\n", yytext); exit(1); }

%%

When I run this (or my complete version), and pass it the input 39if, the error rule is matched and the output is ERROR: 39if, when I'd like it to be:

number: 39
keyword: if

(I.e. the same as if I entered 39 if as the input.)

Going by the manual, I have a hunch that the cause is that the error rule matches a longer possible input than the number and keyword rules, and flex will prefer it. That said, I have no idea how to resolve this situation. It seems unfeasible to write an explicit regexp that will reject all non-error input, and I don't know how else to write a "catch-all" rule for the sake of handling lexer errors.

UPDATE: I suppose I could just make the catch-all rule be . { exit(1); } but I'd like to get some nicer debug output than "I got confused on line 1".

Answer 1

You're quite right that you should just match a single "any" character as a fallback. The "standard" way of getting information about where in the line the parsing is at is to use the --bison-bridge option, but that can be a bit of a pain, particularly if you're not using bison. There are a bunch of other ways -- look in the manual for the ways to specify your own i/o functions, for example, -- but the all around simplest IMHO is to use a start condition:

%x LEXING_ERROR
%%
// all your rules; the following *must* be at the end
.                 { BEGIN(LEXING_ERROR); yyless(1); }
<LEXING_ERROR>.+  { fprintf(stderr,
                            "Invalid character '%c' found at line %d,"
                            " just before '%s'\n",
                            *yytext, yylineno, yytext+1);
                    exit(1);
                  }

Note: Make sure that you've ignored whitespace in your rules. The pattern .+ matches any number but at least one non-newline character, or in other words up to the end of the current line (it will force flex to read that far, which shouldn't be a problem). yyless(n) backs up the read pointer by n characters, so after the . rule matches, it will rescan that character producing (hopefully) a semi-reasonable error message. (It won't really be reasonable if your input is multibyte, or has weird control characters, so you could write more careful code. Up to you. It also might not be reasonable if the error is at the end of a line, so you might also want to write a more careful regex which gets more context, and maybe even limits the number of forward characters read. Lots of options here.)

Look up start conditions in the flex manual for more info about %x and BEGIN