flex and octant and definition

I am writing a parser with flex. I have some problems:
In the definition section I define a whole bunch of stuff and I also
used them to define other things.
So I have:

X       [something]

and I want Y to be anything but X so when I define it like:

Y       [^{X}]     it only exclude the characters '{' , '}' ,and X

I can't find a way to exclude the definitions and use them in
other definitions. Any idea how to do it?


Also I'm trying to set rules for Octant, but lex doesn't let me logical OR
them
together. and I can't do ranging either ([\001-\006]), in case I'm not
clear..So it doesn't let me do:

ACK_BELL        \006 | \007

any Idea how to parse text with Octants?

Also in general can all the control characters (000-037 and 127 in octant)
apear in a text file?

Thanks,

~Mina


Mina Doroudi
Georgia Tech Undergrad
College of Computing
School of Mathematics