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A Functional Program for Regular Expressions Matching

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 6795))

Abstract

Regular expressions [4] and tools to handle them, especially tools for regular expression matching—an early one is described in the seminal paper [5] by Ken Thompson—, are one of the major achievements of formal language and automata theory. Google counts 303,000 results for “regular expressions matching” (May 4, 2011); there are numerous command line tools for working with regular expressions such as grep; Google released a regular expression C++ library not long ago [3]; almost every programming language provides support for regular expressions; and even the text editor I am using to produce the source code of this LaTeX document has an extensive regular expression library.

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References

  1. Fischer, S., Huch, F., Wilke, F.: A play on regular expressions: functional pearl. In: Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming, ICFP 2010, pp. 357–368. ACM, New York (2010)

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  2. Glushkov, V.M.: On a synthesis algorithm for abstract automata. Ukr. Matem. Zhurnal 12(2), 147–156 (1960)

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  3. Google: Re2: a principled approach to regular expression matching (March 11, 2010), http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/03/re2-principled-approach-to-regular.html (press release)

  4. Kleene, S.: Representation of events in nerve nets and finite automata. In: Shannon, C., McCarthy, J. (eds.) Automata Studies, pp. 3–42. Princeton University Press, Princeton (1956)

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  5. Thompson, K.: Programming techniques: Regular expression search algorithm. Commun. ACM 11, 419–422 (1968)

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  6. xkcd.com: Regular expressions, http://xkcd.com/208/

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Wilke, T. (2011). A Functional Program for Regular Expressions Matching. In: Mauri, G., Leporati, A. (eds) Developments in Language Theory. DLT 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6795. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22321-1_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22321-1_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-22320-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-22321-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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