Regular expression to search for Gadaffi

Question

I\'m trying to search for the word Gadaffi. What\'s the best regular expression to search for this?

My best attempt so far is:

\\b[KG]h?add?af?fi$\\         


        

Answer 1

If you want to avoid matching things that no-one has used (ie avoid tending towards ".+") your best approach would be to create a regular expression that's just all the alternatives (eg. (Qadafi|Kadafi|...)) then compile that to a DFA, and then convert the DFA back into a regular expression. Assuming a moderately sensible implementation that would give you a "compressed" regular expression that's guaranteed not to contain unexpected variants.