Ensuring the Correctness of Regular Expressions: A Review  

作　　者：Li-Xiao Zheng Shuai Ma Zu-Xi Chen Xiang-Yu Luo 

机构地区：[1]College of Computer Science and Technology,Huaqiao University,Xiamen 361021,China [2]State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment,Beihang University,Beijing 100191,China

出　　处：《International Journal of Automation and computing》2021年第4期521-535,共15页国际自动化与计算杂志（英文版）

基　　金：by National Natural Science Foundation of China(Nos.61872339,61502184 and 61925203).

摘　　要：Regular expressions are widely used within and even outside of computer science due to their expressiveness and flexibility.However, regular expressions have a quite compact and rather tolerant syntax that makes them hard to understand, hard to compose,and error-prone. Faulty regular expressions may cause failures of the applications that use them. Therefore, ensuring the correctness of regular expressions is a vital prerequisite for their use in practical applications. The importance and necessity of ensuring correct definitions of regular expressions have attracted extensive attention from researchers and practitioners, especially in recent years. In this study, we provide a review of the recent works for ensuring the correct usage of regular expressions. We classify those works into different categories, including the empirical study, test string generation, automatic synthesis and learning, static checking and verification,visual representation and explanation, and repairing. For each category, we review the main results, compare different approaches, and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. We also discuss some potential future research directions.

关 键 词：Regular expressions CORRECTNESS string generation learning static checking VERIFICATION VISUALIZATION repairing 

分 类 号：TP312[自动化与计算机技术—计算机软件与理论]