Regular expression generation through grammatical evolution

Abstract

This study investigates automatic regular expression generation using Grammatical Evolution. The software implementation is based on a subset of POSIX regular expression rules. For fitness calculation, a multiline text file is supplied. Lines which are required to match with generated regular expressions are specified beforehand. Fitness is evaluated according to the successful match results. Using this fitness evaluation strategy, preliminary tests have been performed on different files. Results indicate that the Grammatical Evolution approach to automatic generation of regular expressions is promising.