Explanations for Regular Expressions

Erwig, Martin; Gopinath, Rahul

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-28872-2_27

Cited by 13 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Egret [11] generates strings from regular expressions based on the underlying automata. It first converts a regular expression into a specialized automaton, then derives a set of basis paths of the resulting automaton, and finally creates strings from the basis paths.…”

Section: Coverage Based Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ensuring the Correctness of Regular Expressions: A Review

Zheng

Chen

et al. 2021

Int. J. Autom. Comput.

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Regular expressions are widely used within and even outside of computer science due to their expressiveness and flexibility. However, regular expressions have a quite compact and rather tolerant syntax that makes them hard to understand, hard to compose, and error-prone. Faulty regular expressions may cause failures of the applications that use them. Therefore, ensuring the correctness of regular expressions is a vital prerequisite for their use in practical applications. The importance and necessity of ensuring correct definitions of regular expressions have attracted extensive attention from researchers and practitioners, especially in recent years. In this study, we provide a review of the recent works for ensuring the correct usage of regular expressions. We classify those works into different categories, including the empirical study, test string generation, automatic synthesis and learning, static checking and verification, visual representation and explanation, and repairing. For each category, we review the main results, compare different approaches, and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. We also discuss some potential future research directions.

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Section: Coverage Based Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, recent research has found that regular expressions are hard to understand, hard to compose, and error-prone [10,11] . Indeed, regular expressions have a quite compact and rather tolerant syntax that makes them hard to understand even for very short regular expressions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ensuring the Correctness of Regular Expressions: A Review

Zheng

Chen

et al. 2021

Int. J. Autom. Comput.

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“…Instead, quite the opposite, the length of the expression additionally increases. The lack of abstraction in regular expressions (Erwig & Goponath, 2012) is one of the key deficiencies. It causes scalability problems that result in regular expressions growing quite large quickly.…”

Section: Existing Solutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Also, much of the regular expression code is sometimes redundant (Dasu & Johnson, 2003). A combined explanation for the date expression presented in (Erwig & Goponath, 2012) gives an interesting method of explanation. This method can easily be transformed in an SQL-like language.…”

Section: Existing Solutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

User Defined Named Placeholders for Regular Expression Segments in Complex Regular Expressions

Tair¹

2016

Proceedings of the International Scientific Conference - Sinteza 2016

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Abstract:This paper describes an own implementation of a regular expression preprocessor written in PHP. It extends the regular expression functionality by allowing users to define named segments. These segments include custom character classes, matching groups etc. The pre-processor allows for writing complex regular expressions that are simpler to maintain. In addition, this paper presents a use case of the practical utilisation of the pre-processor. Furthermore, it includes a comparison of expressions written with and without user-defined segments.

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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%

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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Explanations for Regular Expressions

Cited by 13 publications

References 17 publications

Ensuring the Correctness of Regular Expressions: A Review

Ensuring the Correctness of Regular Expressions: A Review

User Defined Named Placeholders for Regular Expression Segments in Complex Regular Expressions

Fault‐based test generation for regular expressions by mutation

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