Summary

The flex and bison tools can be two very important elements for software specification and generation of lexers and grammar parsers. The flex tool allows the specification and generation of lexical analyzers that provide the ability to tokenize the input. The bison tool allows the specification of a grammar, which when generated can take the tokens from the lexical analysis phase to recognize correctly formed input. We demonstrated these tools in two scenarios, looking at two different parsing examples. The build process was also discussed, including linkage between the lexer and parser phases.