Abstract
Most software packages with regular expression matching engines offer operators that extend the classical regular expressions, such as counting, intersection, complementation, and interleaving. Some of the most popular engines, for example those of Java and Perl, also provide operators that are intended to control the nondeterminism inherent in regular expressions. We formalize this notion in the form of the cut and iterated cut operators. They do not extend the class of languages that can be defined beyond the regular, but they allow for exponentially more succinct representation of some languages. Membership testing remains polynomial, but emptiness testing becomes PSPACE-hard.
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Berglund, M., Björklund, H., Drewes, F., van der Merwe, B., Watson, B. (2013). Cuts in Regular Expressions. In: Béal, MP., Carton, O. (eds) Developments in Language Theory. DLT 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7907. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38771-5_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38771-5_8
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