This document discusses lexical analysis in compilers. It defines lexical analysis as the first phase of a compiler that reads a stream of characters as input and produces a sequence of tokens. It describes how a lexical analyzer identifies tokens by using patterns and lookahead. Tokens are syntactic categories like identifiers, numbers, and keywords. The lexical analyzer removes whitespace and comments and returns each lexeme and line number to the parser. Separating lexical and syntactic analysis simplifies compiler design and improves efficiency and portability.