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This paper explores the extent to which regular expressions (regexes) are portable across programming languages. Many languages offer similar regex syntaxes, and it would be natural to assume that regexes can be ported across language…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-05-11 James C. Davis , Louis G. Michael , Christy A. Coghlan , Francisco Servant , Dongyoon Lee

Software engineers use regular expressions (regexes) across a wide range of domains and tasks. To support regexes, software projects must integrate a regex engine, whether provided natively by the language runtime (e.g., Python's re) or…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Berk Çakar , Dongyoon Lee , James C. Davis

Composing regexes is a common but challenging engineering activity. Software engineers struggle with regex complexity, leading to defects, performance issues, and security vulnerabilities. Researchers have proposed tools to synthesize…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Berk Çakar , Charles M. Sale , Sophie Chen , Dongyoon Lee , James C. Davis

Regular expressions cause string-related bugs and open security vulnerabilities for DOS attacks. However, beyond ReDoS (Regular expression Denial of Service), little is known about the extent to which regular expression issues affect…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Peipei Wang , Chris Brown , Jamie A. Jennings , Kathryn T. Stolee

Regular expressions are used for diverse purposes, including input validation and firewalls. Unfortunately, they can also lead to a security vulnerability called ReDoS (Regular Expression Denial of Service), caused by a super-linear…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Sk Adnan Hassan , Zainab Aamir , Dongyoon Lee , James C. Davis , Francisco Servant

In programming by example, users "write" programs by generating a small number of input-output examples and asking the computer to synthesize consistent programs. We consider a challenging problem in this domain: learning regular…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-09-28 Long Ouyang

Many data extraction tasks of practical relevance require not only syntactic pattern matching but also semantic reasoning about the content of the underlying text. While regular expressions are very well suited for tasks that require only…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Qiaochu Chen , Arko Banerjee , Çağatay Demiralp , Greg Durrett , Isil Dillig

Modern regex languages have strayed far from well-understood traditional regular expressions: they include features that fundamentally transform the matching problem. In exchange for these features, modern regex engines at times suffer from…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Aurèle Barrière , Clément Pit-Claudel

Existing support for regular expressions in automated test generation or verification tools is lacking. Common aspects of regular expression engines found in mainstream programming languages, such as backreferences or greedy matching, are…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-03-16 Blake Loring , Duncan Mitchell , Johannes Kinder

There has been much work on synthesizing and repairing regular expressions (regexes for short) from examples. These programming-by-example (PBE) methods help the users write regexes by letting them reflect their intention by examples.…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Nariyoshi Chida , Tachio Terauchi

We present an executable, proven-safe, faithful, and future-proof Coq mechanization of JavaScript regular expression (regex) matching, as specified by the latest published edition of ECMA-262 section 22.2. This is, to our knowledge, the…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2024-07-29 Noé De Santo , Aurèle Barrière , Clément Pit-Claudel

Matching regexes (regular expressions) is a common problem in many areas of computer science, with requirements on high speed and robust performance. Regexes with backreferences allow one to express certain patterns (even beyond regular)…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Vojtěch Havlena , Lukáš Holík , Ondřej Lengál , Jan Vašák , Sabína Gulčíková

Efficient evaluation of regular expressions (regex, for short) is crucial for text analysis, and n-gram indexes are fundamental to achieving fast regex evaluation performance. However, these indexes face scalability challenges because of…

Databases · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Ling Zhang , Shaleen Deep , Jignesh M. Patel , Karthikeyan Sankaralingam

Since regular expressions (abbrev. regexes) are difficult to understand and compose, automatically generating regexes has been an important research problem. This paper introduces TransRegex, for automatically constructing regexes from both…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2021-03-03 Yeting Li , Shuaimin Li , Zhiwu Xu , Jialun Cao , Zixuan Chen , Yun Hu , Haiming Chen , Shing-Chi Cheung

Recent systems for converting natural language descriptions into regular expressions (regexes) have achieved some success, but typically deal with short, formulaic text and can only produce simple regexes. Realworld regexes are complex,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-08-05 Xi Ye , Qiaochu Chen , Xinyu Wang , Isil Dillig , Greg Durrett

Regular expression is important for many natural language processing tasks especially when used to deal with unstructured and semi-structured data. This work focuses on automatically generating regular expressions and proposes a novel…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Desheng Wang , Jiawei Liu , Xiang Qi , Baolin Sun , Peng Zhang

Existing datasets for regular expression (regex) generation from natural language are limited in complexity; compared to regex tasks that users post on StackOverflow, the regexes in these datasets are simple, and the language used to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Xi Ye , Qiaochu Chen , Isil Dillig , Greg Durrett

Most scripting languages nowadays use regex pattern-matching libraries. These regex libraries borrow the syntax of regular expressions, but have an informal semantics that is different from the semantics of regular expressions, removing the…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2014-02-17 Sérgio Medeiros , Fabio Mascarenhas , Roberto Ierusalimschy

Due to the increasing storage data on Web Applications, it becomes very difficult to use only keyword-based searches to provide comprehensive search results, thus increasing the difficulty for web users to search information on the web. In…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-10-12 Ikechukwu Onyenwe , Stanley Ogbonna , Ebele Onyedimma , Onyedikachukwu Ikechukwu-Onyenwe , Chidinma Nwafor

ReDoS is a well-known type of algorithmic complexity attack, where an adversary supplies maliciously crafted strings to a regular expression matching engine, aiming to exhaust computational resources of systems. Even quadratic-time behavior…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Soh Kumabe , Yuya Uezato
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