Programs/Calculators to Minimize Regular Expressions [closed]

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Closed 9 years ago.

I was just wondering if there is any free software out there that is able to effectively minimize regular expressions.

Answer 1

You see this question being asked a lot but I haven't seen an effective one anywhere. If you think though the logic required just to simplify something simple like character ranges in a character class - and the fairly low value of doing something like that I think the lack of these begins to make sense.

As another example, how do you remove unneeded groupings when you don't know how they might be used in a replacement string. I would think any simplification that could be achieved would be mostly superficial.

This guy wrote one in Haskell but didn't share: http://community.haskell.org/~ndm/resimplify/

(PS: I sort of lied - there is one effective Regex simplification tool... The mechanical turk that is Stack Overflow :)

Answer 2

I think I found one located here: http://regexvisualizer.apphb.com/?Regex=%28a%2Bb%2Bc%2B%29%2B%7Cabc&NfaSize=300&DfaSize=250#