John Lindal’s Blog

flex on Mac OS X

I just discovered a horrible bug in the default version of flex (2.5.33) on Mac OS X 10.5.8. It strips out [[ and ]] from literal strings inside %{...}%! First, I tried building flex 2.5.35 from source. This doesn’t mess up the strings, but it blows up inside yy_get_next_buffer(). Then I tried building flex 2.5.4 from source, but it does very strange stuff, too. I finally gave up and split the double square brackets up by using string concatenation: "...[""[:digit:]""]...". It’s ugly, but it works!