Here is one way of formalizing the problem that seems natural, but is actually an exceedingly difficult computational problem: given a sample of some URLs that the regex should match, and some others that the regex should not match, find the smallest regex that is consistent. Even getting a good heuristic is NP-complete (minimum consistent regular expression problem).

I just finished doing something exactly like this for work. I had 679 strings in a total of 51 groups. I had to write 51 regular expressions to match members of the groups without including members of other groups. I spent about 5 minutes searching on google for someone else's solution before I buckled down and wrote a quick script to help me find them. The guts are here:

my %data;
while (<DATA>) {
  chomp;
  my ($v, $k) = split /,/;
  $data{$k} = $v;
}

for my $inst ( sort keys %data ) {
  for my $reg ( sort keys %re ) {
    if( $data{$inst} eq $reg ) {
      print "Should match but doesn't:  $inst, $data{$inst}, $reg, $re
+{$reg}\n" unless $inst =~ $re{
$reg};
    } else {
      print "Is matching but shouldn't: $inst, $data{$inst}, $reg, $re
+{$reg}\n" if $inst =~ $re{$reg
};
    }
  }
}

__DATA___
.
.
.

[download]

%re was a hash containing the group names mapped to regexes. I would run the program in one window, and make corrections in the other. From start to finish took less than an hour.

In reply to Re^2: Reverse regexp a regexp? by Anonymous Monk
in thread Reverse regexp a regexp? by freakingwildchild

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