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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 .
The algorithm works recursively by splitting an expression into its constituent subexpressions, from which the NFA will be constructed using a set of rules. [3] More precisely, from a regular expression E, the obtained automaton A with the transition function Δ [clarification needed] respects the following properties:
? matches the preceding character or group exactly zero or one times. { } match the preceding character or group a fixed number of times. For example, insource:/[a-z]{2}/ matches exactly 2 lowercase letters in a row. insource:/[a-z]{2,4}/ matches any string of 2, 3, or 4 lowercase letters.
While canonical DFA can find out if a string belongs to the language defined by a regular expression, TDFA can also extract substrings that match specific subexpressions. More generally, TDFA can identify positions in the input string that match tagged positions in a regular expression ( tags are meta-symbols similar to capturing parentheses ...
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; substitution: coat → cost
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.
Regular languages are a category of languages (sometimes termed Chomsky Type 3) which can be matched by a state machine (more specifically, by a deterministic finite automaton or a nondeterministic finite automaton) constructed from a regular expression. In particular, a regular language can match constructs like "A follows B", "Either A or B ...
Given a set Σ of symbols (a.k.a. alphabet), a regular expression can be any of ∅ (denoting the empty set of strings), ε (denoting the singleton set containing just the empty string), a (where a is any character in Σ; denoting the singleton set just containing the single-character string a),