The command line syntax for Alex is entirely standard:
$ alex { option } file.x { option }Alex expects a single
file.xfile.hs
The options that Alex accepts are listed below:
-o file, --outfile=fileSpecifies the filename in which the output is to be
placed. By default, this is the name of the input file with
the .x suffix replaced by
.hs.
-i [file], --info [=file]Produces a human-readable rendition of the state
machine (DFA) that Alex derives from the lexer, in
file (default:
file.infofile.x
The format of the info file is currently a bit basic, and not particularly informative.
-t [dir], --template=dirLook in dir for template files.
-g, --ghcCauses Alex to produce a lexer which is optimised for compiling with GHC. The lexer will be significantly more efficient, both in terms of the size of the compiled lexer and its runtime.
-d, --debugCauses Alex to produce a lexer which will output debugging messages as it runs.
-l, --latin1Disables the use of UTF-8 encoding in the generated lexer. This has two consequences:
The Alex source file is still assumed to be UTF-8 encoded, but any Unicode characters outside the range 0-255 are mapped to Latin-1 characters by taking the code point modulo 256.
The built-in macros $printable
and '.' range over the Latin-1
character set, not the Unicode character set.
Note that this currently does not disable the UTF-8 encoding
that happens in the "basic" wrappers,
so --latin1 does not make sense in
conjunction with these wrappers (not that you would want to
do that, anyway).
-?, --helpDisplay help and exit.
-V, --versionOutput version information and exit. Note that for legacy
reasons -v is supported, too, but the use of it
is deprecated. -v will be used for verbose mode
when it is actually implemented.