Regular expression

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Summary

Description what this documentation sums up regular expressions in different Standards and gives an introduction into Python RegEx.

History of Regular Expressions

Regular Expressions, or regexes in short, is a defined sequence of characters that specify a search pattern. These expressions are used by search machines like a search engine for optimized string searching. The concept of regular expressions arose in the 1950 by the mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene. Kleene described regular languages wit the usage of his mathematical notation called regular events. His notation got used for automata theory and the classification and description of formal languages. With the Rise of Computers many more syntaxes for writing regular expressions got developed. The most popular today are the POSIX standard and the Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE). Today regexes are implemented into many programming languages like PHP, Python and Java. Furthermore, companies started to produce hardware, FPGA and GPU implementation of PCRE to overcome the performance problems which some applications cause when using CPUs.

Definition of Regular Expressions

Regular expression gets used to create a pattern that defines the regular language. A finite automata can inspect if the inputted word belongs to the regular language which gets defined by the created pattern.

Syntax of Regular Expressions

The regular expression is using the character of the alphabet Σ. Every alphabet consists at least of the Symbols ε and ∅ and of the operators +, · and *.

The amount of regular expressions over the alphabet Σ gets defined recursively as follows:

  • ε and ∅ are regular expressions
  • Every character a ∈ ∑ is a regular expression
  • If α and β are regular expressions, (α β) and (α + β) are also regular expressions
  • If α is a regular expression, α* is ale a regular expression

Operator priorities:

  • * ties more than ·, which ties stronger than +

Semantics of Regular Expressions

a) The Language L(α) established by the regular expression α is defined as follows:

  • L(∅) = ∅            empty set
  • L(ε) = {ε}            empty string
  • L(a) = {a}            for a ∈ ∑ literal character
  • L(αβ) = L(α)L(β)         concatenation
  • L(α+β) = L(α) ∪ L(β)       alternation
  • L(α)* = L(α)*           (Kleene star) arbitrary repetition

b) The two regular expressions α and β are equivalent in character α ≡ β if L(α) = L(β)

Regular expressions and Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA)

By using a regex processor, the regular expression translated into an internal representation. One possible approach is to use the Thompson's construction algorithm to develop nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) that gets translated into a deterministic finite automaton (DFA), which only accepts words based on the regular expression.

Example:

 (1 + 01 + 001)∗(ε+ 0 + 00)

Speaks the same language of the following DFA:

RegularExpressions Endlicher automat.jpg

Insert image

POSIX Standard

There are three sets of syntaxes defined IEEE POSIX standard. The Basic Regular Expressions (BRE), Extended Regular Expressions (ERE) and the Simple Regular Expressions (SRE). The Simple Regular Expressions syntax is deprecated but the other two provide backwards capabilities.

POSIX basic and extended Semantics

Metacharacter Description
^ Matches the starting position within the string.
. Acts as a wildcard for any existing character
[ ] Matches a singe character that in the brackets
[^ ] Matches everything except the character inside the brackets.
$ Matches the ending position of the string
( ) Defines a marked subexpression
\n Matches what the nth marked subexpression matched, where n is a digit from 1 to 9.
* Arbitrary repetition of the preceding element
{m,n} From m to n repetitions of the preceding element

Examples:

  • ^d..               matches any string with a length of three that starts with d
  • .og               matches any string with a length of three that ends with og, like dog and fog
  • [df]og               matches “dog” and “fog”
  • [^d]og             matches any string which gets accepts by .og exept “dog”
  • dog$              matches any string that ends with dog
  • b.*               matches any word that starts with b like “bee”, “bathroom”

POSIX extended Semantics

Metacharacter Description
? Repetition zero or one times of the preceding element
+ Repetition one or more times of the preceding element
The choice also known as OR

Examples:

  • [e]?l               matches “l” and “el”
  • [e]+l               matches “el”, “eel” and so on
  • eel | fish             accept one of the two strings

Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE)

PCRE is a library that implements a regular expression engine. The library is inspired of the Perl programming language and is written in c. The library is Operating system independent and gets distributed with a POSIX C wrapper.

Perl Compatible Regular Expressions Semantics

Metacharacter Description
\ escape character which can be used multiple times
^ Matches the starting position within the string.
$ Matches the ending position within the string.
. Acts as a wildcard for any existing character except newline
The choice also known as OR
? Repetition zero or one times of the preceding element
* Repetition zero to infinite times of the preceding element
+ Repetition one or more times of the preceding element
- indicates character range
{ } min/max quantifier

Regular Expressions in Python

Python comes with the built in RegEx Module which can be used by the line import re. The module can process Unicode as well as 8-bit strings.

RegEx Modul Metacharacters

Metacharacter Description
[ ] Defines a set of characters
. Acts as a wildcard for any existing character
^ Matches the starting position within the string.
$ Matches the ending position within the string.
* Repetition zero to infinite times of the preceding element
+ Repetition one or more times of the preceding element
{ } min/max quantifier
The choice also known as OR

Character Sets

Character set Description
[abc] Match either ‘a’ or ‘b’ or ‘c’
[a-n] Match with a character in the range
[^abc] Match any character except the in the brackets
[0-9] Matches the Digits
[a-zA-Z] Match any lower or uppercase character
[a-zA-Z0-9] Match any lower or uppercase character and digits

RegEx Modul functions

Function Description
findall() Returns a list containing all matches
search() Searches a string and returns the match object
split() Returns a list where the string has been split at each match
sub() Replaces the matches with a defined string

Match object

Function Description
.span() Returns the start and the end position of the match
.string() Returns the checked string
.group() Returns the matched part of the string

Validation of Regular Expressions with Online Tools

Reading and validating long regular expression may get exhausting sometimes, there exist online tools which facilitate the parsing and testing process. Most of these tools offer Javascript and PCRE for regular expression either used at the client in the browser or on the server side.

Examples of online regular expression tester und debugger:

References