Regular Expressions with Numerical Constraints and Automata with Counters

  • Authors:
  • Dag Hovland

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Informatics, University of Bergen, Norway

  • Venue:
  • ICTAC '09 Proceedings of the 6th International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Regular expressions with numerical constraints are an extension of regular expressions, allowing to bound numerically the number of times that a subexpression should be matched. Expressions in this extension describe the same languages as the usual regular expressions, but are exponentially more succinct. We define a class of finite automata with counters and a deterministic subclass of these. Deterministic finite automata with counters can recognize words in linear time. Furthermore, we describe a subclass of the regular expressions with numerical constraints, a polynomial-time test for this subclass, and a polynomial-time construction of deterministic finite automata with counters from expressions in the subclass.