February 2022
Beginner to intermediate
572 pages
13h
English
Content preview from An Introduction to Formal Languages and Automata, 7th Edition
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3.1 REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
One way of describing regular languages is via the notation of regular expressions. This notation involves a combination of strings of symbols from some alphabet Σ, parentheses, and the operators +, ·, and *. The simplest case is the language {a}, which will be denoted by the regular expression a. Slightly more complicated is the language {a, b, c}, for which, using the + to denote union, we have the regular expression a + b + c. We use · for concatenation and * for star-closure in a similar way. The expression (a + (b · c))* stands for the star-closure of {a}∪{bc}, that is, the language {λ, a, bc, aa, abc, bca, bcbc, aaa, aabc, …}.
Formal Definition of a Regular Expression
We construct regular expressions from primitive ...
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