Re: Lexing Unicode strings?

On 2021-05-04 01:58, John Levine wrote:
> [I still think doing UTF-8 as bytes would work fine. Since no UTF-8 encoding
> is a prefix or suffix of any other UTF-8 encoding, you can lex them
> the same way you'd lex strings of ASCII. In that example above, \xCE,
> \xB1..\xCF, and \x89 can never appear alone in UTF-8, only as part of
> a multi-byte sequence, so if they do, you can put a wildcard . at the
> end to match bogus bytes and complain about an invalid character. Dunno
> what you mean about not always UTF-8; I realize there are mislabeled
> files of UTF-16 that you have to sort out by sniffing the BOM at the
> front, but you do that and turn whatever you're getting into UTF-8
> and then feed it to the lexer.
>
> I agree that lexing Unicode is not a solved problem, and I'm not
> aware of any really good ways to limit the table sizes. -John]


I wrote code, in Haskell and C++, that translates Unicode character
classes into byte classes. From a theoretical standpoint, a Unicode
regular language mapped under UTF-8 is a byte regular language, so it is
possible. So the 2^8 = 256 size tables that Flex uses is enough. The
Flex manual has an example how to make a regular expression replacing
its dot '.' to pick up all legal UTF-8 bytes.

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