Faster Regular Expression Matching

  • Authors:
  • Philip Bille;Mikkel Thorup

  • Affiliations:
  • Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark DK-2800 Kgs.;AT&T Labs--Research, Shannon Laboratory, Florham Park, USA 07932

  • Venue:
  • ICALP '09 Proceedings of the 36th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming: Part I
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Regular expression matching is a key task (and often the computational bottleneck) in a variety of widely used software tools and applications, for instance, the unix grep and sed commands, scripting languages such as awk and perl , programs for analyzing massive data streams, etc. We show how to solve this ubiquitous task in linear space and O (nm (loglogn )/(logn )3/2 + n + m ) time where m is the length of the expression and n the length of the string. This is the first improvement for the dominant O (nm /logn ) term in Myers' O (nm /logn + (n + m )logn ) bound [JACM 1992]. We also get improved bounds for external memory.