A type system for regular expressions

Spishak, Eric; Dietl, Werner; Ernst, M.

doi:10.1145/2318202.2318207

Cited by 37 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Qualifier systems have been developed in these frameworks for checking software properties such as null safety [8], [33], tainting [8], [33], format strings [35], [44], internationalization [33], regular expressions [36], UI threading [17], ownership [20], and immutability [21], [33], [40], [46].…”

Section: Type Qualifiersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cascade: A Universal Programmer-Assisted Type Qualifier Inference Tool

Vakilian¹,

Phaosawasdi²,

Ernst³

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering

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Abstract-Type qualifier inference tools usually operate in batch mode and assume that the program must not be changed except to add the type qualifiers. In practice, programs must be changed to make them type-correct, and programmers must understand them. CASCADE is an interactive type qualifier inference tool that is easy to implement and universal (i.e., it can work for any type qualifier system for which a checker is implemented). It shows that qualifier inference can achieve better results by involving programmers rather than relying solely on automation.

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Section: Type Qualifiersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cascade: A Universal Programmer-Assisted Type Qualifier Inference Tool

Vakilian¹,

Phaosawasdi²,

Ernst³

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering

Self Cite

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“…Previous work investigated static analysis for embedded DSLs like SQL queries [14,32] and regular expressions [30].…”

Section: Static Analysis Of Domain Specific Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A type system for format strings

Weitz

Kim

Srisakaokul

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 2014 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

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Most programming languages support format strings, but their use is error-prone. Using the wrong format string syntax, or passing the wrong number or type of arguments, leads to unintelligible text output, program crashes, or security vulnerabilities.This paper presents a type system that guarantees that calls to format string APIs will never fail. In Java, this means that the API will not throw exceptions. In C, this means that the API will not return negative values, corrupt memory, etc.We instantiated this type system for Java's Formatter API, and evaluated it on 6 large and well-maintained open-source projects. Format string bugs are common in practice (our type system found 104 bugs), and the annotation burden on the user of our type system is low (on average, for every bug found, only 1.0 annotations need to be written).

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“…Therefore, several techniques and tools have been proposed for easing the design of regular expressions and for their validation and testing. For example, some approaches attempt to discover errors using static checking , others using visual debugging ; a different approach proposes to transform a regular expression in a more intelligible format that should allow the developer to understand whether the regular expression is what (s)he had in mind.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, the syntax checking that can be performed over a regular expression is rather limited, and most regular expressions are free of syntax errors: Therefore, it is not common to discover faults at parsing time. Several studies show that regular expressions are quite often faulty, ie, they do not exactly describe the intended language [5,6]: They could accept words that should not be accepted, or refuse words that should be accepted, or both.Therefore, several techniques and tools have been proposed for easing the design of regular expressions and for their validation and testing. For example, some approaches attempt to discover errors using static checking [5], others using visual debugging [7]; a different approach [8] proposes to transform a regular expression in a more intelligible format that should allow the developer to understand whether the regular expression is what (s)he had in mind.However, most of the approaches are based on the use of labelled strings, ie, strings with their evaluation, either accepted or rejected [6,[9][10][11][12].Labelled strings are exploited in 2 ways.…”

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confidence: 99%

Fault‐based test generation for regular expressions by mutation

Arcaini

Gargantini

Riccobene

2018

Software Testing Verif & Rel

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Summary Regular expressions are used to characterize sets of strings (ie, languages) using a pattern‐based syntax. They are applied in different contexts as, for example, data validation in Web forms. However, writing a regular expression that exactly captures the desired set of strings could be particularly difficult, and techniques are sought to validate regular expressions or test their use in applications. A common means to regular expression validation and testing is the generation of a set of labelled strings (ie, strings together with their evaluation). We here propose a fault‐based approach for generating strings usable as tests for regular expressions. We define some fault classes representing mistakes that could be made when writing a regular expression, and we introduce the notion of distinguishing string, ie, a string that is able to expose a fault. Given a regular expression, our approach generates a test suite composed of distinguishing strings that are able to detect possible faults in the regular expression. We present different versions of the approach, which provide different results in terms of test suite size and generation time. Experiments show that the proposed approach can generate compact test suites and that, using suitable optimizations, the generation time is reasonable. Exploiting the proposed fault classes, we use the notion of mutation score to assess the ability of a generic set of strings in exposing possible faults contained in the regular expression under test. A comparison with other test generation tools in terms of mutation score, size, and generation time shows the advantages and limits of our approach.

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A type system for regular expressions

Cited by 37 publications

References 28 publications

Cascade: A Universal Programmer-Assisted Type Qualifier Inference Tool

Cascade: A Universal Programmer-Assisted Type Qualifier Inference Tool

A type system for format strings

Fault‐based test generation for regular expressions by mutation

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