Re: error: invalid character `' (ASCII 0) near line 164, column 2 (problem avoided)

[John W. Eaton]

On 31-Dec-2009, Ben Abbott wrote:

| On Thursday, December 31, 2009, at 03:17PM, "Ben Abbott" <address@hidden> 
wrote:
| >On Thursday, December 31, 2009, at 01:04PM, "Michael D Godfrey" 
<address@hidden> wrote:
| >>
| >> Ben,
| >> 
| >> I just looked on my Linux Fedora 12 system. It uses
| >> flex 2.3.5.  So, it appears that the Mac version must be broken
| >> in some way that is not just the wrong version.  So, you
| >> might try compiling the 2.3.5 version from sourceforge.
| >> They also have earlier versions available in case 2.3.5
| >> fails.
| >> 
| >> Michael
| >> 
| >
| >Michael, do you mean "2.5.35"?
| >
| >Using 2.5.35 from sourceforge, Octave no longer produces the (ASCII 0) 
errors!
| >
| >I took a look at Apple's patches to flex. It looks to me like the one below 
is responsible.
| >
| >http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/flex/flex-24.1/patches/scanEOF.diff
| >
| >---------------
| >--- flex.skl+orig    2006-12-20 12:29:20.000000000 -0800
| >+++ flex.skl 2006-12-20 12:29:32.000000000 -0800
| >@@ -1818,7 +1818,7 @@ m4_ifdef( [[M4_YY_USE_LINENO]],
| >                             case EOB_ACT_END_OF_FILE:
| >                                     {
| >                                     if ( yywrap( M4_YY_CALL_ONLY_ARG ) )
| >-                                            return EOF;
| >+                                            return 0;
| > 
| >                                     if ( ! 
YY_G(yy_did_buffer_switch_on_eof) )
| >                                             YY_NEW_FILE;

Wouldn't this change make it impossible to parse a file containing
ASCII NUL characters if using yyinput?  That doesn't seem like the
right thing to do.

Maybe it's best to just avoid this version of flex instead of trying
to work around the problem in Octave?

jwe