Automatic regex builder

Question

I have N strings. Also, there are K regular expressions, unknown to me. Each string is either matching one of the regular expressions, or it is garbage. There are total of

Answer 1

What you are trying to do is language learning or language inference with a twist: instead of generalising over a set of given examples (and possibly counter-examples), you wish to infer a language with a small yet specific grammar.

I'm not sure how much research is being done on that. However, if you are also interested in finding the minimal (= general) regular expression that accepts all n strings, search for papers on MDL (Minimum Description Length) and FSMs (Finite State Machines).

Two interesting queries at Google Scholar:

• "minimum description length" automata
• "language inference" automata