Chapter Eight:

Regular Expression Applications

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 1 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 We have seen some of the implementation
techniques related to DFAs and NFAs.
These important techniques are like
tricks of the programmer's trade,
normally hidden from the end user. Not
so with regular expressions: they are
often visible to the end user, and part
of the user interface of a variety of
useful software tools.

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 2 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Outline
• 8.1 The egrep Tool
• 8.2 Non-Regular Regexps
• 8.3 Implementing Regexps
• 8.4 Regular Expressions in Java
• 8.5 The lex Tool

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 3 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Text File Search
• Unix tool: egrep
• Searches a text file for lines that contain a
substring matching a specified pattern
• Echoes all such lines to standard output

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 4 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Example: A Constant Substring
File names: fred
barney
wilma
betty
egrep command and results: % egrep 'a' names
barney
wilma
%

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 5 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 More Than Simple Substrings
• egrep understands a language of patterns
• Various dialects of its pattern-language are
also used by many other tools
• Confusingly, these patterns are often called
regular expressions, but they differ from ours
• To keep the two ideas separate, we'll call the
text patterns used by egrep and other tools
by their common nickname: regexps

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 6 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 A Regexp Dialect
* like our Kleene star: for any regexp x, x* matches strings that
are concatenations of zero or more strings from the language
specified by x
| like our +: for any regexps x and y, x|y matches strings that
match either x or y (or both)
() used for grouping
^ this special symbol at the start of the regexp allows it to
match only at the start of the line
$ this special symbol at the end of the regexp allows it to match
only at the end of the line
. matches any symbol (except the end-of-line marker)

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 7 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Example
File names: fred
barney
wilma
betty
egrep for a, followed by any string, followed by y:
% egrep 'a.*y' names
barney
%

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 8 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Example
File names: fred
barney
wilma
betty
egrep for odd-length string; what went wrong?
% egrep '.(..)*' names
fred
barney
wilma
betty
%
Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 9 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber
 Example
File names: fred
barney
wilma
betty
egrep for odd-length line:
% egrep '^.(..)*$' names
fred
barney
wilma
betty
%
Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 10 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber
 Example
File numbers:
0
1
10
11
100
101 egrep for numbers divisible by 3:
110 % egrep '^(0|1(01*0)*1)*$' numbers
111 0
1000 11
1001 110
1010 1001
%

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 11 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Outline
• 8.1 The egrep Tool
• 8.2 Non-Regular Regexps
• 8.3 Implementing Regexps
• 8.4 Regular Expressions in Java
• 8.5 The lex Tool

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 12 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Capturing Parentheses
• Many regexp dialects can define more than
just the regular languages
• Capturing parentheses:
– \( r \) captures the text that was matched by
the regexp r
– \n matches the same text captured by the nth
previous capturing left parenthesis
• Found in grep (but not most versions of
egrep)
Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 13 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber
 Example
File test: abaaba
ababa
abbbabbb
abbaabb
grep for lines that consist of doubled strings:
% grep '^\(.*\)\1$' test
abaaba
abbbabbb
%

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 14 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 More Than Regular
• The formal language corresponding to that
example is {xx | x  *}
• It turns out that this language is not regular
– Like DFAs, regular expressions can do only what
you could implement in a computer using a fixed,
finite amount of memory
– Capturing parentheses must remember a string
whose size is unbounded
• We'll see this more formally later
Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 15 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber
 Outline
• 8.1 The egrep Tool
• 8.2 Non-Regular Regexps
• 8.3 Implementing Regexps
• 8.4 Regular Expressions in Java
• 8.5 The lex Tool

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 16 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Many Regexp Tools
• Many programs make use of regexp dialects:
– Text tools like emacs, vi, and sed
– Compiler construction tools like lex
– Programming languages like Perl, Ruby, and
Python
– Program language libraries like those for Java and
the .NET languages
• How do all these systems implement regexp
matching?
Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 17 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber
 Implementing Regexps
• We've already seen how, roughly:
– Convert regexp to an NFA
– Simulate that
– Or, convert to DFA and simulate that
• Many implementation tricks are possible; we
haven't worried much about efficiency
• And some important details are different
because regexps are used to match
substrings

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 18 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Using a DFA
• Our basic DFA decides after it reads the whole string
• For regexps, we need to find whether any substring is accepted
• That means running the DFA repeatedly, on each successive
starting position
• Run the DFA until:
– it enters an accepting state: that's a match
– enters a non-accepting trap state: restart the DFA from the next
possible starting position
– hits the end of the string: restart the DFA from the next possible
starting position

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 19 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Which Match?
• Some tools needs to know which substring matched
• Capturing parentheses, for example
• If there is more than one match in a given string, which should
the tool find?
– The string abcab contains two substrings that match the regexp ab
• It isn't enough to specify the leftmost match: what if several
matches start at the same place?
– The string abb contains three substrings that match the regexp
ab*, and they all start at the first symbol

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 20 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Longest Leftmost
• Some tools are required to find the longest leftmost
match in a string
– The string abbcabb contains six matches for ab*
– The first abb is the longest leftmost match
• That means running the DFA past accepting states
• Run the DFA starting from each successive position,
until it enters a non-accepting trap or hits the end
– As you go, keep track of the last accepting state entered,
and the string position at the time
– At the end of this iteration, if any accepting state was
recorded, that is the longest leftmost match

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 21 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Using an NFA
• Similar accommodations are required
• Run from each successive starting position
• When an implementation using backtracking
finds a match, it cannot necessarily stop there
• If the longest match is required, it must
remember the match and continue
• Explore all paths through the NFA to make
sure the longest match is found

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 22 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Outline
• 8.1 The egrep Tool
• 8.2 Non-Regular Regexps
• 8.3 Implementing Regexps
• 8.4 Regular Expressions in Java
• 8.5 The lex Tool

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 23 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 java.util.regex
• The Java package java.util.regex contains classes for
working with regexps in Java
• Two particularly important ones:
– The Pattern class
• A compiled version of a regexp, ready to be given an input
string to test
• A bit like a Java representation of an NFA
– The Matcher class
• Has a Pattern, an input string to run it on, and the current state
of the search for a match
• Can find matches within a string and report their locations

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 24 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Example
• A mini-grep written in Java
• We'll take a regexp from the command line,
and make it into a Pattern
• Then, for each line of the standard input:
– we'll make a Matcher for that line and use it to test
for a match with our Pattern
– If it matches, we'll echo the line to the standard
output

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 25 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

import java.io.*;
import java.util.regex.*;

/**
* A Java application to demonstrate the Java package
* java.util.regex. We take one command-line argument,
* which is treated as a regexp and compiled into a
* Pattern. We then use that pattern to filter the
* standard input, echoing to standard output only
* those lines that match the Pattern.
*/

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 26 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

class RegexFilter {
public static void main(String[] args)
throws IOException {

Pattern p = Pattern.compile(args[0]); // the regexp

BufferedReader in = // standard input
new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));

// Read and echo lines until EOF.

String s = in.readLine();
while (s!=null) {
Matcher m = p.matcher(s);
if (m.matches()) System.out.println(s);
s = in.readLine();
}
}
}

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 27 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Example, Continued
• Now this Java application can be used to do
our divisible-by-three filtering:
% java RegexFilter '^(0|1(01*0)*1)*$' < numbers
0
11
110
1001
%

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 28 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Outline
• 8.1 The egrep Tool
• 8.2 Non-Regular Regexps
• 8.3 Implementing Regexps
• 8.4 Regular Expressions in Java
• 8.5 The lex Tool

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 29 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Preconstructing Automata
• Applications like grep take a regexp as user input:
– Convert regexp to automaton
– Simulate the automaton on a text file
– Discard automaton when finished
• Other applications, like compilers, use the same regexp and
automaton each time
• It would be a waste of time to do the regexp-to-automaton
conversion each time the compiler is run

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 30 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 The lex Tool
• lex preconstructs automata:
– Regexps as input
– C source code for a DFA as output
• Similar tools exist for many other output
languages
• Useful for applications like compilers that use
the same set of regexps over and over

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 31 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 The lex Input File
definition section
%%
rules section
%%
user subroutines

• Definition section: a variety of preliminary definitions

• User subroutines: C code for extra C functions used
from inside the rules section
• In our examples, both these sections will be empty:
%%
rules section
%%
Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 32 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber
 Rules Section
%%
abc {fprintf(yyout, "Found one.\n");}
.|\n {}
%%

• The rules section is a list of regexps

• Each regexp is followed by some C code, to
be executed whenever a match is found
• This example has two regexps with code

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 33 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Rules Section
%%
abc {fprintf(yyout, "Found one.\n");}
.|\n {}
%%

• First regexp: abc

• Action when abc is matched: print a message
to the current output file (yyout), which is the
standard output in this case

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 34 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Rules Section
%%
abc {fprintf(yyout, "Found one.\n");}
.|\n {}
%%

• Second regexp: .|\n

– . matches any symbol except end-of-line
– \n matches end-of-line
• Action when .|\n is matched: do nothing
• The string abc matches both regexps, but the lex-
generated code goes with the longest match

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 35 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Running lex
% flex abc.l
% gcc lex.yy.c -o abc –ll
%

• Assuming our example is stored as abc.l

• flex is the gnu implementation of lex
• C code output by flex is stored in lex.yy.c
• The gcc command compiles the C code
– It puts the executable in abc (because of -o abc)
– It links with the special lex library (because of -ll)

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 36 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Running The lex Program
• Suppose abctest contains these lines:
abc
aabbcc
abcabc

• Then our lex program does this:

% abc < abctest
Found one.
Found one.
Found one.
%
Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 37 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber
 Example
%%
^(0|1(01*0)*1)*$ {fprintf(yyout, "%s\n", yytext);}
.|\n {}
%%

• This lex program echoes numbers divisible by 3

• The same thing we've already done with Java and
with egrep
• The lex variable yytext gives us a way to access
the substring that matched the regexp

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 38 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber

 Larger Applications

• For simple applications, the code produced by lex can be

compiled as a stand-alone program, as in the previous
examples
• For most large applications, the code produced by lex is one of
many source files from which the full program is compiled
• Compilers are sometimes written this way:
– lex generates some source
– Other tools (like yacc) generate some source
– Some is written by hand

Formal Language, chapter 8, slide 39 Copyright © 2007 by Adam Webber