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From Regular Expression Matching to Parsing

Authors Philip Bille , Inge Li Gørtz

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ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Design and analysis of algorithms
Keywords
  • regular expressions
  • finite automata
  • regular expression parsing
  • algorithms

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Abstract

Given a regular expression R and a string Q, the regular expression parsing problem is to determine if Q matches R and if so, determine how it matches, e.g., by a mapping of the characters of Q to the characters in R. Regular expression parsing makes finding matches of a regular expression even more useful by allowing us to directly extract subpatterns of the match, e.g., for extracting IP-addresses from internet traffic analysis or extracting subparts of genomes from genetic data bases. We present a new general techniques for efficiently converting a large class of algorithms that determine if a string Q matches regular expression R into algorithms that can construct a corresponding mapping. As a consequence, we obtain the first efficient linear space solutions for regular expression parsing.

Cite As Get BibTex

Philip Bille and Inge Li Gørtz. From Regular Expression Matching to Parsing. In 44th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2019). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 138, pp. 71:1-71:14, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2019) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2019.71

Author Details

Philip Bille
  • Technical University of Denmark, DTU Compute, Denmark
Inge Li Gørtz
  • Technical University of Denmark, DTU Compute, Denmark

Funding

Supported by the Danish Research Council (DFF - 4005-00267, DFF - 1323-00178)

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