Flex query

[Karen Loughran]

Hi there, I notice on GNU's site it indicates there are currently no
mailing groups for Flex.  I hope this is the correct place to email for
a query on use of Flex.



I have the following two rules in my Lexical input file :

@                                { printf("@ received\n"); } 
                                                                           
[[:alnum:][:punct:address@hidden        { printf("ALNUMFIELD received\n"); }


Which will tokenise the following input correctly :


address@hidden

The ouput I receive when I run the lexer with this input is:

ALNUMFIELD received
@ received
ALNUMFIELD received


However, as the rule which identifies an ALUMFIELD contains an "*" to
indicate 0 or more occurrences of the characters are allowed I would
expected the output for the following to be the same.

address@hidden

But it decides to treat the first "a" and second "a" as two separate
ALNUMFIELD's and I'm can't understand why.

ALNUMFIELD received
ALNUMFIELD received
@ received
ALNUMFIELD received


Please can you provide an explanation as to why it doesn't treat "aa" to
be one ALNUMFIELD in this case ?
I want to define a rule which accepts any number of alphanumeric and
punctuation characters (except for "@") as one token.

Thanks for your help,
Karen