Sometimes you need faster and more robust matching than you can get out of Java regular expressions. Maybe they're too slow for you, or you get stack overflows when you match things that are too long, or maybe you want to search for many patterns simultaneously. There plenty of lexical analysis tools you can use, but they invovle a lot of fuss. They make you write specifications in a domain-specific language, often mixed with code, and then generate new java code for a scanner that you have to incorporate into your build and use in pretty specific ways.

DFALex provides that powerful matching capability without all the fuss. It will build you a deterministic finite automaton (DFA, googlable) for a matching/finding multiple patterns in strings simultaneously, which you can then use with various matcher classes to perform searching or scanning operations.

Unlike other tools which use DFAs internally, but only build scanners with them, DFALex provides you with the actual DFA in an easy-to-use form. Yes, you can use it in standard scanners, but you can also use it in other ways that don't fit that mold.

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Requirements

DFALex needs Java 8 or better. No special libraries are required.

If you want to run the tests, you'll need JUnit4.

About

DFALex is written by Matt Timmermans, and is all new code. It's written in Java first, with too much attention paid to performance.

DFAs are generated from NFAs with a starndard powerset construction, and minimized used a fast hash-based variant of Hopcroft's algorithm.

This project was started because lexical analysis is no big deal. You should be able to just do it, without having to convince your team to add a new build step to generate code from a domain specific language. This way you can use it for lots of little jobs, instead of just big, important ones.