Semantic-Based Retrieval System for Regular Expression Usages

Abstract

Regular expression is widely known as a powerful and general-purpose text processing tool for programming. Though the regular expression is highly versatile, there are various difficulties in using them. One promising approach to reduce the burden of the pattern composition is reuse by referring to past usages. Still, several source code-specialized search engines have been proposed, they are not suitable for the scenario of reusing regular expression patterns. The purpose of this study is the efficient reuse of regular expression patterns. To achieve the purpose, we propose a usage retrieval system Resem specialized in regular expression patterns. Resem adopts two key features: search by semantics and collecting input/output examples. As an evaluation result, we confirm that Resem decreased the time required for describing patterns by 16%.