Bison: Syntax Error processing, unexpected and undefined<token>

Question

I want to process undefined and unexpected token error in yyerror func (or maybe by another func if it's possible) for example, i get a error message from Bison

... 
LAC: checking lookahead EXECSQL: S4
Error: popping nterm component_list ()
Stack now 0
Cleanup: discarding lookahead token $undefined ()
Stack now 0
  ERRSTAT = "%X0000002C"

But I want to print which token hasn't been founded and the line number. Is it possible to implement it in Bison and how?

Answer 1

The special token $undefined is reported when yylex returns a token number which doesn't appear in any parser rule. Most of the time, that's the result of the lexer fallback rule:

.        { return yytext[0]; }

But it can also happen if you declare a token in your parser file, and the lexer returns that token, but the token is never actually used in any rule.

Unused tokens don't have names, in the sense that the array of names which Bison includes in your parser doesn't include unused tokens, and so there's no way to look up what the token name originally was. You can, however, often get the token number from the variable yychar . If that number is greater than 0 and less than 256, then the token is probably a single-character token, and you could use that to print an additional error message. However, there's no simple way to modify the error message generated by Bison's verbose error messages; if you're using that feature, you'll still see the invalid token message.

In order to print line numbers, you only need to enable line number counting in the lexical scanner, using

%option yylineno

in your Flex ( .l ) file. Then you can print the value of yylineno in yyerror . (If you're using a "pure" (reentrant) scanner, then yylineno will be in the scanner_t object. In the normal use case where that object is an extra parser argument, it will also be available inside yyerror .)

I know that the above is a bit confusing because there are a lot of different code-generation options with slightly different behaviours. You didn't specify the particular options you're using, so the answer is a bit generic.