alex: Alex is a tool for generating lexical analysers in Haskell

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Alex is a tool for generating lexical analysers in Haskell. It takes a description of tokens based on regular expressions and generates a Haskell module containing code for scanning text efficiently. It is similar to the tool lex or flex for C/C++.


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Versions [RSS] 2.1.0, 2.2, 2.3, 2.3.1, 2.3.2, 2.3.3, 2.3.4, 2.3.5, 3.0, 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.0.3, 3.0.4, 3.0.5, 3.1.0, 3.1.1, 3.1.2, 3.1.3, 3.1.4, 3.1.5, 3.1.6, 3.1.7, 3.2.0, 3.2.1, 3.2.2, 3.2.3, 3.2.4, 3.2.5, 3.2.6, 3.2.7, 3.2.7.1, 3.2.7.2, 3.2.7.3, 3.2.7.4, 3.3.0.0, 3.4.0.0, 3.4.0.1, 3.5.0.0, 3.5.1.0 (info)
Change log CHANGELOG.md
Dependencies array, base (>=2.1 && <5), containers, directory [details]
License BSD-3-Clause
Copyright (c) Chis Dornan, Simon Marlow
Author Chris Dornan and Simon Marlow
Maintainer Simon Marlow <marlowsd@gmail.com>
Category Development
Home page http://www.haskell.org/alex/
Bug tracker https://github.com/simonmar/alex/issues
Source repo head: git clone https://github.com/simonmar/alex.git
Uploaded by JohnEricson at 2022-01-23T23:20:45Z
Distributions Arch:3.3.0.0, Debian:3.2.5, Fedora:3.3.0.0, FreeBSD:3.1.4, LTSHaskell:3.4.0.1, NixOS:3.4.0.1, Stackage:3.5.1.0, openSUSE:3.5.1.0
Reverse Dependencies 1 direct, 0 indirect [details]
Executables alex
Downloads 167980 total (624 in the last 30 days)
Rating 2.0 (votes: 1) [estimated by Bayesian average]
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Status Docs not available [build log]
All reported builds failed as of 2022-01-23 [all 1 reports]

Readme for alex-3.2.7.1

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Alex: A Lexical Analyser Generator

Build Status

Alex is a Lex-like tool for generating Haskell scanners. For complete documentation, see the doc directory.

Alex is covered by a BSD-Style licence; see the licence file in the doc directory for details.

The sources are in the src directory and the documentation in the doc directory; various examples are in the examples subdirectory.

The source code in the src and examples directories is intended to work with GHC >= 7.0.

Build Instructions

If you just want to use Alex, you can download or install (via cabal install alex) an Alex release from Hackage; also note that distributions such as the Haskell Platform and other package manager-based distributions provide packages for Alex. Moreover, recent versions of cabal will automatically install the required version of alex based on build-tools/build-tool-depends declarations.

Read on if you want to build Alex directly from Git.

Alex is built using GHC & Cabal; so first install GHC and cabal-install-2.0 (or later).

Since Alex itself is implemented in terms of an Alex scanner, bootstrapping Alex is a bit tricky:

You need to have the build-tools alex and happy manually installed; either via your system package manager distribution, the Haskell Platform, or e.g. via (run this outside the Git repository!):

$ cabal install alex happy

which installs them into ${HOME}/.cabal/bin by default (make sure they are in your $PATH for the next steps!).

Variant A

You can install alex simply by invoking

$ cabal install

from inside the Git folder.

Variant B

Alternatively, you can use the Makefile which automates the steps of producing a self-contained pre-bootstrapped source distribution with pre-generated lexer/scanners:

$ make sdist
$ cabal install dist/alex-*.tar.gz

For convenience, there is also a make sdist-test target which builds the source source tarball and runs the test-suite from within the source dist.

Contributing & Reporting Issues

Please report any bugs or comments at https://github.com/simonmar/alex/issues

Share and enjoy,

Chris Dornan: cdornan@arm.com

Isaac Jones: ijones@syntaxpolice.org

Simon Marlow: simonmar@microsoft.com

and recent contributors.

Current Maintainers

  • John Ericson (@Ericson2314)

  • Simon Marlow (@simonmar)