Symbolic Regexes and Matching
Microsoft Research, RiSE group
Abstract: Symbolic regex based matching and use of symbolic
derivatives is a new topic with interesting theoretical and practical
challenges driven by concrete applications. I will discuss some of the
recent research and some of the applications in Azure. I will also
discuss some future and ongoing work and other potential applications
in related domains.
There is a new open source .NET regular expression matching tool SRM
implemented in the Microsoft Automata framework. The main feature of
the tool is that the core matching algorithms are based on symbolic
derivatives that support extended regular expression operations such
as intersection and complement. I will discuss the main design
decisions behind the tool, explain the core algorithmic ideas and how
the tool works, discuss some practical usage scenarios, and compare it
to some existing state of the art.