The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
May. 31, 1994
Filed:
Jan. 21, 1992
Jeffrey B Caldwell, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Hewlett-Packard Company, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Abstract
The present invention provides a system and method for building a lexical analyzer that can scan multibyte character sets. The present invention factors regular expressions that contain multibyte characters, so that a single byte finite state automata can be constructed. In particular, the present invention provides a computer-based system and method for tokenizing a source program written in a programming language that is represented by both single byte values and two byte values. The present invention includes a mechanism for building a lexical analyzer that is configured to accept an input specification. The input specification typically includes a regular expression(s) and a corresponding associated action(s). The present invention also including a mechanism for factoring the regular expression(s), if the regular expression(s) contains at least one two byte character, into a regular expression(s) containing only single byte characters. The present invention will result in both a significantly smaller lexical analyzer which uses substantially less memory and a lexical analyzer which easily recognizes a heterogeneous input stream of single and two byte characters.