An effective algorithm for the membership problem for extended regular expressions

  • Authors:
  • Grigore Roşu

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  • Venue:
  • FOSSACS'07 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Foundations of software science and computational structures
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

By adding the complement operator (¬), extended regular expressions (ERE) can encode regular languages non-elementarily more succinctly than regular expressions. The ERE membership problem asks whether a word w of size n belongs to the language of an ERE R of size m. Unfortunately, the best known membership algorithms are either non-elementary in m or otherwise require space Ω(n2) and time Ω(n3); since in many practical applications n can be very large, these space and time requirements could be prohibitive. In this paper we present an ERE membership algorithm that runs in space O(nċ (log n+m) ċ2m) and time O(n2 ċ (log n + m) ċ 2m)ċ The presented algorithm outperforms the best known algorithms when n is exponentially larger than m.