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Type inference for unique pattern matching

Author:

Stijn VansummerenAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), Volume 28, Issue 3

Pages 389 - 428

https://doi.org/10.1145/1133651.1133652

Published: 01 May 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Regular expression patterns provide a natural, declarative way to express constraints on semistructured data and to extract relevant information from it. Indeed, it is a core feature of the programming language Perl, surfaces in various UNIX tools such as sed and awk, and has recently been proposed in the context of the XML programming language XDuce. Since regular expressions can be ambiguous in general, different disambiguation policies have been proposed to get a unique matching strategy. We formally define the matching semantics under both (1) the POSIX, and (2) the first and longest match disambiguation strategies. We show that the generally accepted method of defining the longest match in terms of the first match and recursion does not conform to the natural notion of longest match. We continue by solving the type inference problem for both disambiguation strategies, which consists of calculating the set of all subparts of input values a subexpression can match under the given policy.

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Cited By

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
Florenzano FRiveros CUgarte MVansummeren SVrgoč D(2020)Efficient Enumeration Algorithms for Regular Document SpannersACM Transactions on Database Systems10.1145/335145145:1(1-42)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3351451
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Type inference for unique pattern matching

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems Volume 28, Issue 3

May 2006

187 pages

ISSN:0164-0925

EISSN:1558-4593

DOI:10.1145/1133651

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Copyright © 2006 ACM.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 May 2006

Published in TOPLAS Volume 28, Issue 3

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Cited By

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
Florenzano FRiveros CUgarte MVansummeren SVrgoč D(2020)Efficient Enumeration Algorithms for Regular Document SpannersACM Transactions on Database Systems10.1145/335145145:1(1-42)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3351451
Fagin RKimelfeld BReiss FVansummeren S(2016)A Relational Framework for Information ExtractionACM SIGMOD Record10.1145/2935694.293569644:4(5-16)Online publication date: 9-May-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2935694.2935696
Fagin RKimelfeld BReiss FVansummeren S(2016)Declarative Cleaning of Inconsistencies in Information ExtractionACM Transactions on Database Systems10.1145/287720241:1(1-44)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2877202
Ausaf FDyckhoff RUrban C(2016)POSIX Lexing with Derivatives of Regular Expressions (Proof Pearl)Interactive Theorem Proving10.1007/978-3-319-43144-4_5(69-86)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2016
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43144-4_5
Pacheco HZan THu ZChitil OKing ADanvy O(2014)BiFluXProceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming10.1145/2643135.2643141(147-158)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2643135.2643141
Fagin RKimelfeld BReiss FVansummeren SHull RGrohe M(2014)Cleaning inconsistencies in information extraction via prioritized repairsProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems10.1145/2594538.2594540(164-175)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2594538.2594540
Sulzmann MLu K(2014)POSIX Regular Expression Parsing with DerivativesFunctional and Logic Programming10.1007/978-3-319-07151-0_13(203-220)Online publication date: 2014
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07151-0_13
(2012)Translating regular expression matching into transducersJournal of Applied Logic10.1016/j.jal.2011.11.00310:1(32-51)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2012
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Nielsen LHenglein F(2011)Bit-coded regular expression parsingProceedings of the 5th international conference on Language and automata theory and applications10.5555/2022896.2022930(402-413)Online publication date: 26-May-2011
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