Regular Expressions with Backreferences on Multiple Context-Free Languages, and the Closed-Star Condition

TL;DR

This paper explores the expressive power of regular expressions with backreferences, comparing them to multiple context-free languages, and introduces a new syntactic condition called closed-star that bounds their complexity.

Contribution

It establishes the relationship between rewbs and various language classes, and introduces the closed-star condition to limit backreference complexity.

Findings

Rewbs are a proper subclass of unary-PMCFLs.

Rewbs are not contained in MCFLs even with limited references.

Closed-star rewbs fall within unary-MCFLs and NESL classes.

Abstract

Backreference is a well-known practical extension of regular expressions and most modern programming languages, such as Java, Python, JavaScript and more, support regular expressions with backreferences (rewb) in their standard libraries for string processing. A difficulty of backreference is non-regularity: unlike some other extensions, backreference strictly enhances the expressive power of regular expressions and thus rewbs can describe non-regular (in fact, even non-context-free) languages. In this paper, we investigate the expressive power of rewbs by comparing rewbs to multiple context-free languages (MCFL) and parallel multiple context-free languages (PMCFL). First, we prove that the language class of rewbs is a proper subclass of unary-PMCFLs. The class of unary-PMCFLs coincides with that of EDT0L languages, and our result strictly improves the known upper bound of rewbs. Additionally, we show that, however, the language class of rewbs is not contained in that of MCFLs even when restricted to rewbs with only one capturing group and no captured references. Therefore, in general, the parallelism seems essential for rewbs. Backed by these results, we define a novel syntactic condition on rewbs that we call closed-star and observe that it provides an upper bound on the number of times a rewb references the same captured string. The closed-star condition allows dispensing with the parallelism: that is, we prove that the language class of closed-star rewbs falls inside the class of unary-MCFLs, which is equivalent to that of EDT0L systems of finite index. Furthermore, as additional evidence for the robustness of the condition, we show that the language class of closed-star rewbs also falls inside the class of nonerasing stack languages (NESL).