title: Building a lexer in C
body: <p>I want to build a lexer in C and I am following the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_book" rel="nofollow noreferrer">dragon book</a>, I can understand the state transitions but how to implement them?</p>
  
  <p>Is there a better book?</p>
  
  <p>The fact that I have to parse a string through a number of states so that I can tell whether the string is acceptable or not!</p>