Negated pattern in JFlex

Question

I am using JFlex to parse strings. I have state VARIABLE where I want to parse everything between <...>

For that I defined this in my .flex file:

<VARIABLE> {
     [^>]+   {  return symbol(sym.VARIABLE, new String(yytext())); }
     ">"     {  yybegin(YYINITIAL); return symbol(sym.RVARIABLE); }
}

Unfortunately [^>]+ does not work as JFlex does not match any string. Obviously simplification to pattern [a-z]+ works correctly.

Thanks