Re: Regular expressions; cannonical form and reducer?

Gregory Guthrie <guthrie@mum.edu> wrote:
>I am interested in any references to a standard cannonical form for
>regular expressions, and any system that would transform Regex into
>such forms.


It would be straightforward enough to do for "least common denominator"
regular expressions. The hard part would be constructing a standard form
which also covers all of the weird hacks people have added to various
flavors of regular expressions over the years.


A non-trivial related problem is that different implementations can yield
different behavior from identical regular expressions, because of subtle
(or not-so-subtle) differences in the matching algorithms. Capturing this
in a canonical form would be very difficult.
--
| Henry Spencer
| henry@zoo.toronto.edu
--

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