From: Ned Konz <ned@...>
Date: 2002-07-29T08:39:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Regular Expression question

On Sunday 28 July 2002 02:54 pm, John wrote:
> All,
>
> Anyone know of anything that exists to create regular expressions
> from sample data?  Information, code, references, etc.

There is a Perl module that generates regexes given a word list.

I've seen Java code that generates regexes given a set of numbers.

I doubt that it's easy to do a good job of dealing with arbitrary 
unstructured text.

> If nothing exists I would like to create something in Ruby that
> does just this.  I don't presume to believe it to be easy, but
> could be very helpful if it worked.

Since for a given text there are likely to be a large number of 
regexes that match, how would you know which one was best for your 
uses?

If there were some defining structure: field delimiters, fixed-width 
fields, etc., it would be much easier.

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE