From regular expression matching to parsing

Abstract

Given a regular expression R and a string Q, the regular expression parsing problem is to determine if Q matches R and if so, determine how it matches, i.e., by a mapping of the characters of Q to the characters in R. Regular expression parsing makes finding matches of a regular expression even more useful by allowing us to directly extract subpatterns of the match, e.g., for extracting IP-addresses from internet traffic analysis or extracting subparts of genomes from genetic data bases. We present a new general techniques for efficiently converting a large class of algorithms that determine if a string Q matches regular expression R into algorithms that can construct a corresponding mapping. As a consequence, we obtain the first efficient linear space solutions for regular expression parsing.