article

Open access

Regular expression types for XML

Authors:

Jérôme Vouillon,

Benjamin C. PierceAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), Volume 27, Issue 1

Pages 46 - 90

https://doi.org/10.1145/1053468.1053470

Published: 01 January 2005 Publication History

Abstract

We propose regular expression types as a foundation for statically typed XML processing languages. Regular expression types, like most schema languages for XML, introduce regular expression notations such as repetition (*), alternation (|), etc., to describe XML documents. The novelty of our type system is a semantic presentation of subtyping, as inclusion between the sets of documents denoted by two types. We give several examples illustrating the usefulness of this form of subtyping in XML processing.The decision problem for the subtype relation reduces to the inclusion problem between tree automata, which is known to be EXPTIME-complete. To avoid this high complexity in typical cases, we develop a practical algorithm that, unlike classical algorithms based on determinization of tree automata, checks the inclusion relation by a top-down traversal of the original type expressions. The main advantage of this algorithm is that it can exploit the property that type expressions being compared often share portions of their representations. Our algorithm is a variant of Aiken and Murphy's set-inclusion constraint solver, to which are added several new implementation techniques, correctness proofs, and preliminary performance measurements on some small programs in the domain of typed XML processing.

References

[1]

Aiken, A. and Murphy, B. R. 1991. Implementing regular tree expressions. In Proceedings of Functional Programming and Computer Architecture, J. Hughes, Ed. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 523. Springer-Verlag, New York.]]

[2]

Amadio, R. M. and Cardelli, L. 1993. Subtyping recursive types. ACM Trans. Prog. Lang. Syst. 15, 4, 575--631. (Preliminary version in POPL '91 (pp. 104--118); also DEC Systems Research Center Research Report number 62, August 1990.)]]

[3]

Brandt, M. and Henglein, F. 1998. Coinductive axiomatization of recursive type equality and subtyping. Fund. Inf. 33, 309--338.]]

[4]

Bray, T., Paoli, J., Sperberg-McQueen, C. M., and Maler, E. 2000. Extensible markup language (XML#8482;). http://www.w3.org/XML/.]]

[5]

Brzozowski, J. A. 1964. Derivatives of regular expressions. J. ACM 11, 4 (Oct.), 481--494.]]

[6]

Buneman, P., Davidson, S., Fernandez, M., and Suciu, D. 1997. Adding structure to unstructured data. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Database Theory. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1. Springer-Verlag, New York, 336--351.]]

[7]

Buneman, P. and Pierce, B. 1998. Union types for semistructured data. In Proceedings of the International Database Programming Languages Workshop. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1686. Springer-Verlag, New York.]]

[8]

Cai, J. and Paige, R. 1995. Using multiset discrimination to solve language processing problems without hashing. Theoret. Comput. Sci. 145, 1--2, 189--228.]]

[9]

Chawathe, S. S. 1999. Comparing hierarchical data in external memory. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (Edinburgh, Scotland, U.K.). 90--101.]]

[10]

Clark, J. 1999. XSL Transformations (XSLT). http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt.]]

[11]

Clark, J. 2001. TREX: Tree Regular Expressions for XML. http://www.thaiopensource.com/trex/.]]

[12]

Clark, J. and Murata, M. 2001. RELAX NG. http://www.relaxng.org.]]

[13]

Cluet, S. and Siméon, J. 1998. Using YAT to build a web server. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB). 118--135.]]

[14]

Comon, H., Dauchet, M., Gilleron, R., Jacquemard, F., Lugiez, D., Tison, S., and Tommasi, M. 1999. Tree automata techniques and applications (Draft book; available electronically on http://www.grappa.univ-lille3.fr/tata.)]]

[15]

Damm, F. M. 1994. Subtyping with union types, intersection types and recursive types. In Proceedings of the Theoretical Aspects of Computer Software, M. Hagiya and J. C. Mitchell, Eds. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 789. Springer-Verlag, New York, 687--706.]]

[16]

Davidson, A., Fuchs, M., Hedin, M., Jain, M., Koistinen, J., Lloyd, C., Maloney, M., and Schwarzhof, K. 1999. Schema for object-oriented XML. http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-SOX/.]]

[17]

Davies, R. 2000. Tree automata inclusion. Personal communication.]]

[18]

Deutsch, A., Fernandez, M., Florescu, D., Levy, A., and Suciu, D. 1998. XML-QL: A Query Language for XML. http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-xml-ql.]]

[19]

DOM. 2001. Document object model (DOM). http://www.w3.org/DOM/.]]

[20]

Fallside, D. C. 2001. XML Schema Part 0: Primer, W3C Recommendation. http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-0/.]]

[21]

Fernández, M. F., Siméon, J., and Wadler, P. 2001. A semi-monad for semi-structured data. In Proceedings of 8th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2001), J. V. den Bussche and V. Vianu, Eds. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1973. Springer-Verlag, New York, 263--300.]]

[22]

Freeman, T. and Pfenning, F. 1991. Refinement types for ML. In Proceedings of the SIGPLAN '91 Symposium on Language Design and Implementation (Toronto, Ont. Canada). ACM, New York.]]

[23]

Frisch, A., Castagna, G., and Benzaken, V. 2002. Semantic subtyping. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic In Computer Science. 137--146.]]

[24]

Gapeyev, V., Levin, M., and Pierce, B. 2000. Recursive subtyping revealed. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP). 221--232.]]

[25]

Gilleron, R., Tison, S., and Tommasi, M. 1999. Set constraints and automata. Inf. Comput. 149, 1, 1--41.]]

[26]

Goldman, R. and Widom, J. 1997. Dataguides: Enabling query formulation and optimization in semistructured databases. In VLDB'97, Proceedings of 23rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, M. Jarke, M. J. Carey, K. R. Dittrich, F. H. Lochovsky, P. Loucopoulos, and M. A. Jeusfeld, Eds. Morgan Kaufmann, 436--445.]]

[27]

Hopcroft, J. E. and Ullman, J. D. 1979. Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass.]]

[28]

Hornung, T. 1996. Labelled trees and their recognition. In Publ. Math. Debrecen. Number 3--4 in 48. 309--316.]]

[29]

Hosoya, H. 2003. Regular expression pattern matching---A simpler design. Tech. Rep. 1397, RIMS, Kyoto University.]]

[30]

Hosoya, H. and Pierce, B. C. 2002. Regular expression pattern matching for XML. J. Funct. Prog. 13, 6, 961--1004. (Short version appeared in Proceedings of the 25th Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, pp. 67--80, 2001.)]]

[31]

Hosoya, H. and Pierce, B. C. 2003. XDuce: A typed XML processing language. ACM Trans. Internet Tech. 3, 2, 117--148. (Short version appeared in Proceedings of 3rd International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB2000), volume 1997 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag, New York, 2000, pp. 226--244.)]]

[32]

Klarlund, N., Møller, A., and Schwartzbach, M. I. 2000. DSD: A schema language for XML. http://www.brics.dk/DSD/.]]

[33]

Kuper, G. M. and Siméon, J. 2001. Subsumption for XML types. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT'2001). London.]]

[34]

Meijer, E. and Shields, M. 1999. XMλ: A functional programming language for constructing and manipulating XML documents. Manuscript.]]

[35]

Milo, T., Suciu, D., and Vianu, V. 2000. Typechecking for XML transformers. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems. ACM, New York, 11--22.]]

[36]

Murata, M. 2000. Hedge automata: A formal model for XML schemata. http://www.xml.gr.jp/relax/hedge_nice.html.]]

[37]

Murata, M. 2001. RELAX (REgular LAnguage description for XML). http://www.xml.gr.jp/relax/.]]

[38]

Papakonstantinou, Y. and Vianu, V. 2000. DTD Inference for views of XML data. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (Dallas, Tex.). ACM, New York, 35--46.]]

[39]

Seidl, H. 1990. Deciding equivalence of finite tree automata. SIAM J. Comput. 19, 3 (June), 424--437.]]

[40]

Shields, M. and Meijer, E. 2001. Type-indexed rows. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (London, United Kingdom). ACM New York.]]

[41]

Wallace, M. and Runciman, C. 1999. Haskell and XML: Generic combinators or type-based translation? In Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP'99). ACM SIGPLAN Notices, vol. 34-9. ACM, New York, 148--159.]]

Cited By

Cutler JWatson CNkurumeh EHilliard PGoldstein HStanford CPierce B(2024)Stream TypesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36564348:PLDI(1412-1436)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656434
Negi SBhat V(2024)Face Index of Silicon Carbide Structures: An Alternative ApproachSilicon10.1007/s12633-024-03119-0Online publication date: 29-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12633-024-03119-0
Bergami GZegadło W(2023)Towards a Generalised Semistructured Data Model and Query LanguageACM SIGWEB Newsletter10.1145/3609429.36094332023:Summer(1-22)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3609429.3609433
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Regular expression types for XML
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Data types and structures

Recommendations

Regular expression types for XML

We propose regular expression types as a foundation for XML processing languages. Regular expression types are a natural generalization of Document Type Definitions (DTDs), describing structures in XML documents using regular expression operators (i.e., ...
Parametric polymorphism for XML

Despite the extensiveness of recent investigations on static typing for XML, parametric polymorphism has rarely been treated. This well-established typing discipline can also be useful in XML processing in particular for programs involving “parametric ...
XDuce: A statically typed XML processing language

XDuce is a statically typed programming language for XML processing. Its basic data values are XML documents, and its types (so-called regular expression types) directly correspond to document schemas. XDuce also provides a flexible form of regular ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems Volume 27, Issue 1

January 2005

184 pages

ISSN:0164-0925

EISSN:1558-4593

DOI:10.1145/1053468

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2005 ACM.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 January 2005

Published in TOPLAS Volume 27, Issue 1

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

139
Total Citations
View Citations
1,776
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)96
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)13

Reflects downloads up to 03 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Cutler JWatson CNkurumeh EHilliard PGoldstein HStanford CPierce B(2024)Stream TypesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36564348:PLDI(1412-1436)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656434
Negi SBhat V(2024)Face Index of Silicon Carbide Structures: An Alternative ApproachSilicon10.1007/s12633-024-03119-0Online publication date: 29-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12633-024-03119-0
Bergami GZegadło W(2023)Towards a Generalised Semistructured Data Model and Query LanguageACM SIGWEB Newsletter10.1145/3609429.36094332023:Summer(1-22)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3609429.3609433
Urban C(2023)POSIX Lexing with Derivatives of Regular ExpressionsJournal of Automated Reasoning10.1007/s10817-023-09667-167:3Online publication date: 8-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10817-023-09667-1
Yang ZYang CHan FZhuang MYang BYang ZCheng XZhao YShi WXi HYu HLiu BPan YYin BChen JXu Q(2022)OceanBaseProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3554821.355483015:12(3385-3397)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/3554821.3554830
Parreaux LChau C(2022)MLstruct: principal type inference in a Boolean algebra of structural typesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35633046:OOPSLA2(449-478)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3563304
Ji TLi PYilmaz EAyday EYe YSun J(2021)Differentially private binary- and matrix-valued data queryProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3446095.344610614:5(849-862)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/3446095.3446106
Habib AShinnar AHirzel MPradel MCadar CZhang X(2021)Finding data compatibility bugs with JSON subschema checkingProceedings of the 30th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3460319.3464796(620-632)Online publication date: 11-Jul-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3460319.3464796
Parreaux L(2020)The simple essence of algebraic subtyping: principal type inference with subtyping made easy (functional pearl)Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34090064:ICFP(1-28)Online publication date: 3-Aug-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3409006
Kellogg MSchäf MTasiran SErnst MGrundy JLe Goues CLo D(2020)Continuous complianceProceedings of the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3324884.3416593(511-523)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3324884.3416593
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents