Flex & Bison

Book excerpt: If you need to parse or process text data in Linux or Unix, this useful book explains how to use flex and bison to solve your problems quickly. flex & bison is the long-awaited sequel to the classic O'Reilly book, lex & yacc. In the nearly two decades since the original book was published, the flex and bison utilities have proven to be more reliable and more powerful than the original Unix tools. flex & bison covers the same core functionality vital to Linux and Unix program development, along with several important new topics. You'll find revised tutorials for novices and references for advanced users, as well as an explanation of each utility's basic usage and simple, standalone applications you can create with them. With flex & bison, you'll discover the wide range of uses these flexible tools offer. Address syntax crunching that regular expressions tools can't handle Build compilers and interpreters, and handle a wide range of text processing functions Interpret code, configuration files, or any other structured format Learn key programming techniques, including abstract syntax trees and symbol tables Implement a full SQL grammar-with complete sample code Use new features such as pure (reentrant) lexers and parsers, powerful GLR parsers, and interfaces to C++