English

String Solving with Stabilization and Transducers (Technical Report)

Formal Languages and Automata Theory 2026-05-19 v2 Logic in Computer Science

Abstract

We generalize an efficient automata-based approach to string constraint solving, the stabilization-based method behind the solver Z3-Noodler, to support relational constraints represented by finite-state transducers (useful, for example, for modeling replaceAll constraints). We focus on an efficient treatment of length constraints by reducing the need for expensive concatenation elimination, which is a major bottleneck in automata-based string solving. We also propose powerful heuristics that significantly improve performance in practice. Implemented on top of Z3-Noodler, our method vastly outperforms existing solvers on benchmarks with relational constraints. It solves more instances and runs orders of magnitude faster.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.14872,
  title  = {String Solving with Stabilization and Transducers (Technical Report)},
  author = {David Chocholatý and Vojtěch Havlena and Lukáš Holík and Juraj Síč and Michal Šedý},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.14872},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

To be published at CAV'26