regular expression example generator

[François Pinard]

Skip Montanaro <skip at mojam.com> writes:

>     John> I have a faint recollection of hearing somewhere that someone for
>     John> some language had written some software which took a regular
>     John> expression and generated for you the types of things that would
>     John> match it.

> I've never heard of such a beast, though I suppose if something like this
> existed it would be more likely to live in the Perl half of the universe.
> That's okay, since the re module's re syntax is (or should be) a proper
> subset of Perl's.  I'd ask over there.

Olivier Lecarme (around Nice by now?) once wrote, long ago, a compiler
compiler using recursive descent, meant to be executed in Pascal, but
accepting generic grammars, of course.  If I remember well, he had a
tool to generate sources guaranteed to exercise all the grammar rules.
Those tools might not be what you want, but if you are really starving
for ideas, we can try to find Olivier and you could ask. :-) I read him,
sometimes, on the TM/SEMI mailing lists.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard