Efficient algorithm for converting a character set into a nfa/dfa

Question

I\'m currently working on a scanner generator. The generator already works fine. But when using character classes the algorithm gets very slow.

The scanner generator pr

Answer 1

In this library (http://mtimmerm.github.io/dfalex/) I do it by putting a range of consecutive characters on each transition, instead of single characters. This is carried through all the steps of NFA constuction, NFA->DFA conversion, DFA minimization, and optimization.

It's quite compact, but it adds code complexity to every step.