Lexical analysis

In computer science, lexical analysis is the process of converting a sequence of characters (such as a computer program or web page) into a sequence of tokens (strings with an identified "meaning").

Description

A program that performs lexical analysis may be called a lexer, tokenizer, or scanner (though "scanner" is also used to refer to the first stage of a lexer).

Such a lexer is generally combined with a parser, which together analyze the syntax of programming languages, web pages, and so forth.

See also

• Computer program
• Computer programming
• Computer science
• Compiler
• Programming language
• Syntax (programming languages)

External links

• Lexical analysis @ Wikipedia