Flex(lexer) support for unicode

Question

I am wondering if the newest version of flex supports unicode?

If so, how can use patterns to match Chinese characters?

More: Use regular expression to match

Answer 1

Flex does not support Unicode. However, Flex supports "8 bit clean" binary input. Therefore you can write lexical patterns which match UTF-8. You can use these patterns in specific lexical areas of the input language, for instance identifiers, comments or string literals.

This will work for well for typical programming languages, where you may be able to assert to the users of your implementation that the source language is written in ASCII/UTF-8 (and no other encoding is supported, period).

This approach won't work if your scanner must process text that can be in any encoding. It also won't work (very well) if you need to express lexical rules specifically for Unicode elements. I.e. you need Unicode characters and Unicode regexes in the scanner itself.

The idea is that you can recognize a pattern which includes UTF-8 bytes using a lex rule, (and then perhaps take the yytext, and convert it out of UTF-8 or at least validate it.)

For a working example, see the source code of the TXR language, in particular this file: http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/txr/tree/parser.l

Scroll down to this section:

ASC     [\x00-\x7f]
ASCN    [\x00-\t\v-\x7f]
U       [\x80-\xbf]
U2      [\xc2-\xdf]
U3      [\xe0-\xef]
U4      [\xf0-\xf4]

UANY    {ASC}|{U2}{U}|{U3}{U}{U}|{U4}{U}{U}{U}
UANYN   {ASCN}|{U2}{U}|{U3}{U}{U}|{U4}{U}{U}{U} 
UONLY   {U2}{U}|{U3}{U}{U}|{U4}{U}{U}{U}

As you can see, we can define patterns to match ASCII characters as well as UTF-8 start and continuation bytes. UTF-8 is a lexical notation, and this is a lexical analyzer generator, so ... no problem!

Some explanations: The UANY means match any character, single-byte ASCII or multi-byte UTF-8. UANYN means like UANY but no not match the newline. This is useful for tokens that do not break across lines, like say a comment from # to the end of the line, containing international text. UONLY means match only a UTF-8 extended character, not an ASCII one. This is useful for writing a lex rule which needs to exclude certain specific ASCII characters (not just newline) but all extended characters are okay.

DISCLAIMER: Note that the scanner's rules use a function called utf8_dup_from to convert the yytext to wide character strings containing Unicode codepoints. That function is robust; it detects problems like overlong sequences and invalid bytes and properly handles them. I.e. this program is not relying on these lex rules to do the validation and conversion, just to do the basic lexical recognition. These rules will recognize an overlong form (like an ASCII code encoded using several bytes) as valid syntax, but the conversion function will treat them properly. In any case, I don't expect UTF-8 related security issues in the program source code, since you have to trust source code to be running it anyway (but data handled by the program may not be trusted!) If you're writing a scanner for untrusted UTF-8 data, take care!