Lexical Analyzer Architecture.
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How tokens are recognized
The main task of lexical analysis is to read input characters in the code and produce tokens.
Lexical analyzer scans the entire source code of the program. It identifies each token one by one. Scanners are usually implemented to produce tokens only when requested by a parser. Here is how this works-
Lexical Analyzer skips whitespaces and comments while creating these tokens. If any error is present, then Lexical analyzer will correlate that error with the source file and line number.
- "Get next token" is a command which is sent from the parser to the lexical analyzer.
- On receiving this command, the lexical analyzer scans the input until it finds the next token.
- It returns the token to Parser.
Lexical Analyzer skips whitespaces and comments while creating these tokens. If any error is present, then Lexical analyzer will correlate that error with the source file and line number.