Building a dynamic regular expression from sampled data

Abstract

Described are systems and methods for automatically generating, by a computing device, a regular expression that matches a list of input strings. A method includes identifying a set of baseline regular expression classes that match a portion of an input string of the list of input strings. The method further generates a current regular expression as a sequence of baseline regular expression classes from the set of baseline regular expression classes based on matching baseline regular expression classes to characters of a first input string of the list of input strings. The method further determines whether the current regular expression matches all input strings of the list of input strings, and if it does not, the method regenerates a portion of the current regular expression that occurs after an earliest character, in order, of one of the one or more input strings, that does not match the current regular expression.