String (computer science)In computer programming, a string is traditionally a sequence of characters, either as a literal constant or as some kind of variable. The latter may allow its elements to be mutated and the length changed, or it may be fixed (after creation). A string is generally considered as a data type and is often implemented as an array data structure of bytes (or words) that stores a sequence of elements, typically characters, using some character encoding. String may also denote more general arrays or other sequence (or list) data types and structures.
Empty stringIn formal language theory, the empty string, or empty word, is the unique string of length zero. Formally, a string is a finite, ordered sequence of characters such as letters, digits or spaces. The empty string is the special case where the sequence has length zero, so there are no symbols in the string. There is only one empty string, because two strings are only different if they have different lengths or a different sequence of symbols. In formal treatments, the empty string is denoted with ε or sometimes Λ or λ.
Regular expressionA regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a match pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" or "find and replace" operations on strings, or for input validation. Regular expression techniques are developed in theoretical computer science and formal language theory. The concept of regular expressions began in the 1950s, when the American mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene formalized the concept of a regular language.
SubstringIn formal language theory and computer science, a substring is a contiguous sequence of characters within a string. For instance, "the best of" is a substring of "It was the best of times". In contrast, "Itwastimes" is a subsequence of "It was the best of times", but not a substring. Prefixes and suffixes are special cases of substrings. A prefix of a string is a substring of that occurs at the beginning of ; likewise, a suffix of a string is a substring that occurs at the end of .
Free monoidIn abstract algebra, the free monoid on a set is the monoid whose elements are all the finite sequences (or strings) of zero or more elements from that set, with string concatenation as the monoid operation and with the unique sequence of zero elements, often called the empty string and denoted by ε or λ, as the identity element. The free monoid on a set A is usually denoted A∗. The free semigroup on A is the subsemigroup of A∗ containing all elements except the empty string. It is usually denoted A+.
String operationsIn computer science, in the area of formal language theory, frequent use is made of a variety of string functions; however, the notation used is different from that used for computer programming, and some commonly used functions in the theoretical realm are rarely used when programming. This article defines some of these basic terms. A string is a finite sequence of characters. The empty string is denoted by . The concatenation of two string and is denoted by , or shorter by . Concatenating with the empty string makes no difference: .
Formal languageIn logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language consists of words whose letters are taken from an alphabet and are well-formed according to a specific set of rules. The alphabet of a formal language consists of symbols, letters, or tokens that concatenate into strings of the language. Each string concatenated from symbols of this alphabet is called a word, and the words that belong to a particular formal language are sometimes called well-formed words or well-formed formulas.
Formal grammarIn formal language theory, a grammar (when the context is not given, often called a formal grammar for clarity) describes how to form strings from a language's alphabet that are valid according to the language's syntax. A grammar does not describe the meaning of the strings or what can be done with them in whatever context—only their form. A formal grammar is defined as a set of production rules for such strings in a formal language. Formal language theory, the discipline that studies formal grammars and languages, is a branch of applied mathematics.
Kleene starIn mathematical logic and computer science, the Kleene star (or Kleene operator or Kleene closure) is a unary operation, either on sets of strings or on sets of symbols or characters. In mathematics, it is more commonly known as the free monoid construction. The application of the Kleene star to a set is written as . It is widely used for regular expressions, which is the context in which it was introduced by Stephen Kleene to characterize certain automata, where it means "zero or more repetitions".
ConcatenationIn formal language theory and computer programming, string concatenation is the operation of joining character strings end-to-end. For example, the concatenation of "snow" and "ball" is "snowball". In certain formalisations of concatenation theory, also called string theory, string concatenation is a primitive notion. In many programming languages, string concatenation is a binary infix operator, and in some it is written without an operator.
Alphabet (formal languages)In formal language theory, an alphabet, sometimes called a vocabulary, is a non-empty set of indivisible symbols/glyphs, typically thought of as representing letters, characters, digits, phonemes, or even words. Alphabets in this technical sense of a set are used in a diverse range of fields including logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics. An alphabet may have any cardinality ("size") and depending on its purpose maybe be finite (e.g., the alphabet of letters "a" through "z"), countable (e.
String-searching algorithmIn computer science, string-searching algorithms, sometimes called string-matching algorithms, are an important class of string algorithms that try to find a place where one or several strings (also called patterns) are found within a larger string or text. A basic example of string searching is when the pattern and the searched text are arrays of elements of an alphabet (finite set) Σ. Σ may be a human language alphabet, for example, the letters A through Z and other applications may use a binary alphabet (Σ = {0,1}) or a DNA alphabet (Σ = {A,C,G,T}) in bioinformatics.
Chomsky hierarchyThe Chomsky hierarchy (infrequently referred to as the Chomsky–Schützenberger hierarchy) in the fields of formal language theory, computer science, and linguistics, is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars. A formal grammar describes how to form strings from a language's vocabulary (or alphabet) that are valid according to the language's syntax. Linguist Noam Chomsky theorized that four different classes of formal grammars existed that could generate increasingly complex languages.
Context-sensitive languageIn formal language theory, a context-sensitive language is a language that can be defined by a context-sensitive grammar (and equivalently by a noncontracting grammar). Context-sensitive is one of the four types of grammars in the Chomsky hierarchy. Computationally, a context-sensitive language is equivalent to a linear bounded nondeterministic Turing machine, also called a linear bounded automaton. That is a non-deterministic Turing machine with a tape of only cells, where is the size of the input and is a constant associated with the machine.
Automata theoryAutomata theory is the study of abstract machines and automata, as well as the computational problems that can be solved using them. It is a theory in theoretical computer science. The word automata comes from the Greek word αὐτόματος, which means "self-acting, self-willed, self-moving". An automaton (automata in plural) is an abstract self-propelled computing device which follows a predetermined sequence of operations automatically. An automaton with a finite number of states is called a Finite Automaton (FA) or Finite-State Machine (FSM).
Suffix treeIn computer science, a suffix tree (also called PAT tree or, in an earlier form, position tree) is a compressed trie containing all the suffixes of the given text as their keys and positions in the text as their values. Suffix trees allow particularly fast implementations of many important string operations. The construction of such a tree for the string takes time and space linear in the length of .
Symbol (formal)A logical symbol is a fundamental concept in logic, tokens of which may be marks or a configuration of marks which form a particular pattern. Although the term "symbol" in common use refers at some times to the idea being symbolized, and at other times to the marks on a piece of paper or chalkboard which are being used to express that idea; in the formal languages studied in mathematics and logic, the term "symbol" refers to the idea, and the marks are considered to be a token instance of the symbol.
Regular grammarIn theoretical computer science and formal language theory, a regular grammar is a grammar that is right-regular or left-regular. While their exact definition varies from textbook to textbook, they all require that all production rules have at most one non-terminal symbol; that symbol is either always at the end or always at the start of the rule's right-hand side. Every regular grammar describes a regular language.
Sedsed ("stream editor") is a Unix utility that parses and transforms text, using a simple, compact programming language. It was developed from 1973 to 1974 by Lee E. McMahon of Bell Labs, and is available today for most operating systems. sed was based on the scripting features of the interactive editor ed ("editor", 1971) and the earlier qed ("quick editor", 1965–66). It was one of the earliest tools to support regular expressions, and remains in use for text processing, most notably with the substitution command.
Regular languageIn theoretical computer science and formal language theory, a regular language (also called a rational language) is a formal language that can be defined by a regular expression, in the strict sense in theoretical computer science (as opposed to many modern regular expression engines, which are augmented with features that allow the recognition of non-regular languages). Alternatively, a regular language can be defined as a language recognized by a finite automaton.
