String input to flex lexer

The following routines are available for setting up input buffers for scanning in-memory strings instead of files (as yy_create_buffer does):

  • YY_BUFFER_STATE yy_scan_string(const char *str): scans a NUL-terminated string`
  • YY_BUFFER_STATE yy_scan_bytes(const char *bytes, int len): scans len bytes (including possibly NULs) starting at location bytes

Note that both of these functions create, return a corresponding YY_BUFFER_STATE handle (which you must delete with yy_delete_buffer() when done with it) so yylex() scan a copy of the string or bytes. This behavior may be desirable since yylex() modifies the contents of the buffer it is scanning).

If you want avoid the copy (and yy_delete_buffer) using:

  • YY_BUFFER_STATE yy_scan_buffer(char *base, yy_size_t size)

sample main:

int main() {
    yy_scan_buffer("a test string");
    yylex();
}

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