3.8 Multiple Parsers in the Same Program

Most programs that use Bison parse only one language and therefore contain only one Bison parser. But what if you want to parse more than one language with the same program? Then you need to avoid a name conflict between different definitions of yyparse, yylval, and so on.

The easy way to do this is to use the option ‘-p prefix’ (see section Invoking Bison). This renames the interface functions and variables of the Bison parser to start with prefix instead of ‘yy’. You can use this to give each parser distinct names that do not conflict.

The precise list of symbols renamed is yyparse, yylex, yyerror, yynerrs, yylval, yylloc, yychar and yydebug. If you use a push parser, yypush_parse, yypull_parse, yypstate, yypstate_new and yypstate_delete will also be renamed. For example, if you use ‘-p c’, the names become cparse, clex, and so on.

All the other variables and macros associated with Bison are not renamed. These others are not global; there is no conflict if the same name is used in different parsers. For example, YYSTYPE is not renamed, but defining this in different ways in different parsers causes no trouble (see section Data Types of Semantic Values).

The ‘-p’ option works by adding macro definitions to the beginning of the parser source file, defining yyparse as prefixparse, and so on. This effectively substitutes one name for the other in the entire parser file.