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I'm a bit confused, aren't lexers implemented using similar techniques as regular expressions? (i.e: NFA to DFA conversion and DFA minimization).

Or maybe I'm also confusing lexers with lexer generators.

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The term "regex" usually means not "regular expressions" in the formal languages sense but rather the trickier operational notion that makes use of backtracking.

Look at http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/448/regular-expr...

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