FindFLEX

Find Fast Lexical Analyzer (Flex) executable and provides a macro to generate custom build rules

The module defines the following variables:

FLEX_FOUND - True is flex executable is found
FLEX_EXECUTABLE - the path to the flex executable
FLEX_VERSION - the version of flex
FLEX_LIBRARIES - The flex libraries
FLEX_INCLUDE_DIRS - The path to the flex headers

The minimum required version of flex can be specified using the standard syntax, e.g. find_package(FLEX 2.5.13)

If flex is found on the system, the module provides the macro:

FLEX_TARGET(Name FlexInput FlexOutput
            [COMPILE_FLAGS <string>]
            [DEFINES_FILE <string>]
            )

which creates a custom command to generate the FlexOutput file from the FlexInput file. Name is an alias used to get details of this custom command. If COMPILE_FLAGS option is specified, the next parameter is added to the flex command line.

Added in version 3.5: If flex is configured to output a header file, the DEFINES_FILE option may be used to specify its name.

Changed in version 3.17: When CMP0098 is set to NEW, flex runs in the CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR directory.

The macro defines the following variables:

FLEX_${Name}_DEFINED - true is the macro ran successfully
FLEX_${Name}_OUTPUTS - the source file generated by the custom rule, an
alias for FlexOutput
FLEX_${Name}_INPUT - the flex source file, an alias for ${FlexInput}
FLEX_${Name}_OUTPUT_HEADER - the header flex output, if any.

Flex scanners often use tokens defined by Bison: the code generated by Flex depends of the header generated by Bison. This module also defines a macro:

ADD_FLEX_BISON_DEPENDENCY(FlexTarget BisonTarget)

which adds the required dependency between a scanner and a parser where FlexTarget and BisonTarget are the first parameters of respectively FLEX_TARGET and BISON_TARGET macros.

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Example:

find_package(BISON)
find_package(FLEX)

BISON_TARGET(MyParser parser.y ${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}/parser.cpp)
FLEX_TARGET(MyScanner lexer.l  ${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}/lexer.cpp)
ADD_FLEX_BISON_DEPENDENCY(MyScanner MyParser)

 include_directories(${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR})
 add_executable(Foo
    Foo.cc
    ${BISON_MyParser_OUTPUTS}
    ${FLEX_MyScanner_OUTPUTS}
 )
 target_link_libraries(Foo ${FLEX_LIBRARIES})
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