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To decide whether two given regular expressions describe the same language, each can be converted into an equivalent minimal deterministic finite automaton via Thompson's construction, powerset construction, and DFA minimization. If, and only if, the resulting automata agree up to renaming of states, the regular expressions' languages agree.
The equivalence of regular expressions and finite automata is known as Kleene's theorem [3] (after American mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene). In the Chomsky hierarchy , regular languages are the languages generated by Type-3 grammars .
However, it can make a regular expression much more concise—eliminating a single complement operator can cause a double exponential blow-up of its length. [26] [27] [28] Regular expressions in this sense can express the regular languages, exactly the class of languages accepted by deterministic finite automata. There is, however, a ...
Therefore, the length of the regular expression representing the language accepted by M is at most 1 / 3 (4 n+1 (6s+7)f - f - 3) symbols, where f denotes the number of final states. This exponential blowup is inevitable, because there exist families of DFAs for which any equivalent regular expression must be of exponential size.
It is widely used for regular expressions, which is the context in which it was introduced by Stephen Kleene to characterize certain automata, where it means "zero or more repetitions".
Given a set of strings (also called "positive examples"), the task of regular language induction is to come up with a regular expression that denotes a set containing all of them. As an example, given {1, 10, 100}, a "natural" description could be the regular expression 1⋅0 * , corresponding to the informal characterization " a 1 followed by ...
Conversely, Kleene's algorithm can be used to convert an NFA into a regular expression (whose size is generally exponential in the input automaton). NFAs have been generalized in multiple ways, e.g., nondeterministic finite automata with ε-moves , finite-state transducers , pushdown automata , alternating automata , ω-automata , and ...
Thus, it forms a bridge between regular expressions and nondeterministic finite automata: two abstract representations of the same class of formal languages. A regular expression may be used to conveniently describe an advanced search pattern in a "find and replace"–like operation of a text processing utility.