Testing Regex Generalizability And Its Implications: A Large-Scale Many-Language Measurement Study

Davis, James N.; Moyer, D. D.; Kazerouni, Ayaan M.; Lee, Dong-Yoon

doi:10.1109/ase.2019.00048

Cited by 15 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Davis et al [33] performed an empirical study by comparing two different notations (textual and graphical) of regular expressions and considering different factors such as the length of regular expressions to find how these factors affect the readability of regular expressions. They used the time required for finding the shortest strings as the primary measurement in their experiments.…”

Section: Othersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Coverage criteria are usually defined with respect to programs. In [33], a notion of pairwise coverage is proposed that is defined for regular expressions. The idea adopts pairwise testing [35] , a combinatorial method for testing software systems.…”

Section: Coverage Based Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…All these tools generate only positive strings. The fault detection ability of the generated strings is not quite satisfactory compared with coverage-based generation or mutation-based generation methods, as illustrated in [11,33,49].…”

Section: Sampling and Enumerationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Testing status [14] RE coverage based [33] From positive examples [52] Syntax check [10] Highlight [72−74] Based on positive examples [83] Bug classification [22] DFA coverage based [11] From both examples [53−57] Semantic check [68−70] Automaton graph [75−79] Based on negative examples [84] Feature usage [8] Mutation based [49] Gold′s learning [59−61] Verification [71] Tree view [74,80] Based on both examples [85] Evolution [24] Sampling [40,41] From specifications [62−64] Visual IDE [81] Based on genetic programming [88,89] Comprehension [23] Enumerating [91] From specifications and examples [66] Visual structure [82] Interactive repair [90] Composition [25] Random [45,47] Abstraction [12] Repair vulnerable [86,87] Portability [28] Systematic [46−48] Development cycle [30] Determinism [32] Readability [92]…”

Section: Open Accessmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

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: Othersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Coverage Based Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Sampling and Enumerationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Open Accessmentioning

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 expression research in software engineering has explored performance issues [8,64], comprehension [6], translation between languages [12,13], and test coverage [63]. These efforts are motivated by the assumption that regular expressions are pervasive in systems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Demystifying Regular Expression Bugs: A comprehensive study on regular expression bug causes, fixes, and testing

Wang,

Brown,

Jennings

et al. 2021

Preprint

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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 development and how these issues are addressed in practice. We conduct an empirical study of 356 merged regex-related pull request bugs from Apache, Mozilla, Facebook, and Google GitHub repositories. We identify and classify the nature of the regular expression problems, the fixes, and the related changes in the test code.The most important findings in this paper are as follows: 1) incorrect regular expression behavior is the dominant root cause of regular expression bugs (165/356, 46.3%). The remaining root causes are incorrect API usage (9.3%) and other code issues that require regular expression changes in the fix (29.5%), 2) fixing regular expression bugs is nontrivial as it takes more time and more lines of code to fix them compared to the general pull requests, 3) most (51%) of the regex-related pull requests do not contain test code changes. Certain regex bug types (e.g., compile error, performance issues, regex representation) are less likely to include test code changes than others, and 4) the dominant type of test code changes in regex-related pull requests is test case addition (75%). The results of this study contribute to a broader understanding of the practical problems faced by developers when using, fixing, and testing regular expressions.

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Smaller Representation of Compiled Regular Expressions

Sung

Han

2023

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Testing Regex Generalizability And Its Implications: A Large-Scale Many-Language Measurement Study

Cited by 15 publications

References 33 publications

Ensuring the Correctness of Regular Expressions: A Review

Ensuring the Correctness of Regular Expressions: A Review

Demystifying Regular Expression Bugs: A comprehensive study on regular expression bug causes, fixes, and testing

Smaller Representation of Compiled Regular Expressions

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