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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.
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 compiles declarative regular expression specifications to deterministic finite automata. Originally written by Peter Bumbulis and described in his paper, [1] re2c was put in public domain and has been since maintained by volunteers. [3] It is the lexer generator adopted by projects such as PHP, [4] SpamAssassin, [5] Ninja build system [6 ...
A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp), [1] sometimes referred to as rational expression, [2] [3] is a sequence of characters that specifies a match pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" or "find and replace" operations on strings, or for input validation.
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 ...
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".
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. Glushkov's algorithm can be used to transform it into an NFA, which furthermore is small by nature, as the number of its states equals the number of symbols of the regular expression, plus one.
In theoretical computer science and formal language theory, a regular language (also called a rational language) [1] [2] is a formal language that can be defined by a regular expression, in the strict sense in theoretical computer science (as opposed to many modern regular expression engines, which are augmented with features that allow the recognition of non-regular languages).