[ncl-install] flex error: bad character: %

[Jan Ploski]

Mary Haley wrote:
> Hi Jan,
> 
> What kind of system is this on, and do you have a system "flex" that you 
> can use instead? I checked the version of flex on three different 
> systems that we have, and they are all running a slightly newer version, 
> 3.5.4. Perhaps you could try this one.

According to the following Sourceforge page:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=97492

2.5.34 is the newest version, which is what I downloaded and compiled. 
Where can I get 3.5.4? No RPM version of flex is installed and I am not 
the administrator on the target system. It is running Scientific Linux 4.4.

Are you saying that the file ncl.l translates without problems for you 
and has the same content as mine? I suspected that this may be a 
generated file and something might have gone wrong during its 
generation. I don't know the flex syntax, so I couldn't tell by looking.

Best regards,
Jan Ploski

> On Jan 6, 2008, at 4:55 AM, Jan Ploski wrote:
> 
>> Hello,
>>
>> After getting around the ncargpath problem (thanks, Mary) I'm still
>> having trouble compiling NCL. This time I'm getting errors from flex:
>>
>> flex ncl.l
>> ncl.l:262: bad character: %
>> ncl.l:262: unknown error processing section 1
>> ncl.l:262: unknown error processing section 1
>> ncl.l:262: bad character: 4
>> ncl.l:262: bad character: 0
>> ncl.l:262: bad character: 0
>> ncl.l:262: bad character: 0
>> ncl.l:263: bad character: %
>> ncl.l:263: unknown error processing section 1
>> ncl.l:263: bad character: 4
>> ncl.l:263: bad character: 0
>> ncl.l:263: bad character: 0
>> ncl.l:263: bad character: 0
>> make[4]: *** [lex.yy.c] Error 1
>> make[4]: Leaving directory
>> `/direct/home/VO_SW_DIR/wisent/src/ncl_ncarg-5.0.0/ni/src/ncl'
>>
>>
>> I'm using a self-compiled flex-2.5.34. The ncl.l file has the following
>> content around line 262 (the line which begins with %a):
>>
>>                 _NclResetScanner();
>>                 SetLine(line_numbers[loading]);
>>                 return(NhlFATAL);
>>         }
>> }
>> %}
>> %a 4000
>> %o 4000
>> let     [_a-zA-Z]
>> alnum   [_a-zA-Z0-9]
>> white   [\t ]
>> digit   [0-9]
>>
>>
>> I don't know if it is relevant, but I'm also getting messages like
>>
>> make[4]: Warning: File `Makefile' has modification time 2.4e+03 s in the
>> future
>>
>> which I am unable to fix by 'touch'ing files (output of stat on these
>> files looks ok).
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Jan Ploski
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>