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Every regular expression can be written solely in terms of the Kleene star and set unions over finite words. This is a surprisingly difficult problem. As simple as the regular expressions are, there is no method to systematically rewrite them to some normal form. The lack of axiom in the past led to the star height problem.
In many programming languages, a particular syntax of strings is used to represent regular expressions, which are patterns describing string characters. However, it is possible to perform some string pattern matching within the same framework that has been discussed throughout this article.
String functions common to many languages are listed below, including the different names used. The below list of common functions aims to help programmers find the equivalent function in a language. Note, string concatenation and regular expressions are handled in separate pages.
The closeness of a match is measured in terms of the number of primitive operations necessary to convert the string into an exact match. This number is called the edit distance between the string and the pattern. The usual primitive operations are: [1] insertion: cot → coat; deletion: coat → cot
For example, in the text string: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. the string is not implicitly segmented on spaces, as a natural language speaker would do. The raw input, the 43 characters, must be explicitly split into the 9 tokens with a given space delimiter (i.e., matching the string " "or regular expression /\s{1}/).
A parsing expression is a kind of pattern that each string may either match or not match.In case of a match, there is a unique prefix of the string (which may be the whole string, the empty string, or something in between) which has been consumed by the parsing expression; this prefix is what one would usually think of as having matched the expression.
For example, in Python, raw strings are preceded by an r or R – compare 'C:\\Windows' with r'C:\Windows' (though, a Python raw string cannot end in an odd number of backslashes). Python 2 also distinguishes two types of strings: 8-bit ASCII ("bytes") strings (the default), explicitly indicated with a b or B prefix, and Unicode strings ...
Python supports a wide variety of string operations. Strings in Python are immutable, so a string operation such as a substitution of characters, that in other programming languages might alter the string in place, returns a new string in Python. Performance considerations sometimes push for using special techniques in programs that modify ...