Lex compatibility
grmtools currently supports one common use of Lex, which is to produce a sequence of tokens. All Lex files require at least some porting to grmtools, though in many cases this is fairly trivial. Nevertheless, aspects such as the longest match rule are identical to Lex, and we assume familiarity with Lex syntax and its major features: the Lex manual is recommended reading.
Major differences
There are several major differences between Lex and grmtools:
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Lex has its own regular expression language whereas grmtools uses the well known Rust regex crate for regular expressions. These two regular expression languages are very similar, but complex regular expressions might not be supported under one or the other.
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Lex files consist of a sequence of regular expressions and an action for each. grmtools lex files consists of a sequence of regular expressions and a token name. Actions are not currently supported (and, by extension, nor are special action expressions such as
ECHOandREJECT). -
Start conditions, character sets, and changes to internal array sizes are not supported by grmtools.