Lexical analysis is the first phase of compilation. It reads source code characters and divides them into tokens by recognizing patterns using finite automata. It separates tokens, inserts them into a symbol table, and eliminates unnecessary characters. Tokens are passed to the parser along with line numbers for error handling. An input buffer is used to improve efficiency by reading source code in blocks into memory rather than character-by-character from secondary storage. Lexical analysis groups character sequences into lexemes, which are then classified as tokens based on patterns.
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