minimalist regular expression

[borges2003xx]

Exists some tool, programs or some able to compute the minimal regular
expression, namely ,taking a series of regular exoression, the minimal
one that makes the same matching?
thanx in advance

 

[Trent Mick]

[[email protected] wrote]

Exists some tool, programs or some able to compute the minimal regular
expression, namely ,taking a series of regular exoression, the minimal
one that makes the same matching?

def get_minimal_regex(*regexes):
return ".*"

Or, slightly less smart-ass-y:

def get_not_really_minimal_regex(*regexes):
return "(" + "|".join(regexes) + ")"

Trent

 

[borges2003xx]

very nice

 

[John Bokma]

Exists some tool, programs or some able to compute the minimal regular
expression, namely ,taking a series of regular exoression, the minimal
one that makes the same matching?
thanx in advance

length? (define minimal) :-D.

 

[borges2003xx]

the shortest description in regex way

 

[Paul Lalli]

Exists some tool, programs or some able to compute the minimal regular
expression, namely ,taking a series of regular exoression, the minimal
one that makes the same matching?
thanx in advance

m//;

it matches everything. Perhaps you need to better define your problem
statement. Sample input, desired output...

Paul Lalli

 

[John Bokma]

the shortest description in regex way

Which is? Oh, and please quote the previous message and author. Reply under
the part you are replying too, etc. Even with Google this is possible.

 

[Paul McGuire]

Google for "optimized regexp" returns:
http://laurent.riesterer.free.fr/regexp/make-regexp.html
http://search.cpan.org/~dankogai/Regexp-Optimizer-0.15/

There are several more links, but all appear to be written in languages
other than Python. Perhaps you could port one of them.

It also seems that a similar thread came up here recently, at least in
the special form of converting a list of words to a single regexp. In
general, this seems to be a difficult problem, not only to implement,
but to test. At least the conversion of a list of words to a single
regexp is easily tested against the input set, although as some of the
other clever posters have noted, it is possible to create a regexp that
is *too* matchable.

-- Paul

 

[Brian McCauley]

m//;

it matches everything.

Not in Perl it doesn't.

 

[Paul Lalli]

Not in Perl it doesn't.

Sure it does.... provided you haven't tried matching anything else
beforehand...

Paul Lalli

 

[borges2003xx]

Whenever I ask a match in a string for(a{3,}b and match for (a{1,}, the
first is implicit second: ab is implicit in a.*;automatically