Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!ig!arizona!rupley
From: rupley@arizona.edu (John Rupley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Want a way to strip comments from a
Summary: comments do not overflow yytext[]
Message-ID: <9919@megaron.arizona.edu>
Date: 28 Mar 89 10:04:16 GMT
References: <7150@siemens.UUCP> <9900010@bradley> <4896@cbnews.ATT.COM> <795@twwells.uucp>
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 26


In article <795@twwells.uucp>, bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells) writes:
> In article <9797@megaron.arizona.edu> rupley@arizona.edu (John Rupley) writes:
> : A Lex source for uncommenting is attached (which I hope does not belie
> : the remark above about hard to get the logic wrong :-).
> 
> Try it on a very long comment. You might discover an overflowed lex
> buffer. On the other hand, this shouldn't be too hard to fix. Just do
> for the comment what you did for the noncommented text.

Nope.... no problem.... comments are thrown away line-by-line, by design,
so that very long comments indeed do not blow the buffer.

A very long string, however, will overflow the buffer, but clearly this
is understood, and it can be viewed as a feature, although
idiosyncratic, as noted in <9888@megaron.arizona.edu>.  If you want to
handle strings differently, add another start condition (state) begun
by '"' and make explicit start condition 0 = <INITIAL>, or change the
size of the match buffer (yytext[]) by including in the definitions:

	%{
	#define YYLMAX 5000	/* or whatever */
	%}

John Rupley
rupley!local@megaron.arizona.edu