Re^2: Testing regex equivalence

What I want to do is really to parse the regex in some way and simplifiy it, if possible. So say I have a regex generator and for a certain input it produces

.*(.*)$

I would like to be able to recognise that this is the same as

.*

Thanks,

loris

"It took Loris ten minutes to eat a satsuma . . . twenty minutes to get from one end of his branch to the other . . . and an hour to scratch his bottom. But Slow Loris didn't care. He had a secret . . ."

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Re^3: Testing regex equivalence by Corion (Patriarch) on Feb 21, 2006 at 13:19 UTC
They aren't strictly equivalent, because the first regex has capturing parentheses even if they only will ever match the empty string at the end of the string. But assuming you have `/(?:.).$/ # and /.$/` [download] you could convert them into canonical form, that is, normalize all `.` to become `(?:.)`, and then simplify, mapping `(?:.)(?:.)` to `(?:.)`.	[reply] [d/l] [select]