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in reply to Re: back translating regular expressions
in thread back translating regular expressions

What on earth does that have to do with the halting problem? A computer going into an infinite loop is not the halting problem. If you meant that you can't tell whether a regular-expression denotes an infinite language, that's not quite right either. It's infinite if and only if it contains an infinite quantifier (+, *, {m,}), which is an easy property to check.

blokhead

  • Comment on Re^2: back translating regular expressions

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Re^3: back translating regular expressions
by Anonymous Monk on Mar 03, 2005 at 10:05 UTC 
        /a/

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    does not contain a quantifier, but there are an infinite amount of strings it will match. And if you only want to consider anchored strings: 
        my $q1;
       $q1 = qr /a(??{$q1})?/;
    my $q2 = qr /^$q1$/;

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    matches all strings containing nothing but a's. But it doesn't use any of the quantifiers you mentioned.

    Also, 

        /^(?!)*$/

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    contains a * quantifier, but it doesn't actually match any string. Perhaps you want to discount lookahead. Then I give you: 
        /^(|)*$/

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    It'll give a warning, but all it matches is the empty string. But it does have a * quantifier.
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