Get all strings matching given RegExp

Can I get sequence of all strings that can match a given regular
expression? For example, for expression '(a|b)|(x|y)' it would be ['ax',
'ay', 'bx', 'by']

It would be useful for example to pass these strings to a search engine
not supporting RegExp (therefore adding such support to it). A program
can also let user specify sequence of strings using RegExp (filenames to
process, etc.). If there are other types of expressions for these
purposes, please let me know.

I know that for some expressions there would be infinite amount of
matching strings, but these aren't the cases I'm considering. It'd still
be possible if string length is limited (there might be large but finite
number of matching strings).

Thanks

I don't think there is any built in way.  Regular expressions are
compiled into an expanded pattern internally, but I don't think that
it is anything that would be useful for you to directly access.

If you are interested in a lot of work, you could do something with
PLY and write an re parser that would expand it into a series of
possible textual matches :)

Alex9968 <noname9968@gmail.com> wrote:
> Can I get sequence of all strings that can match a given regular
> expression? For example, for expression '(a|b)|(x|y)' it would be ['ax',
> 'ay', 'bx', 'by']
>
> It would be useful for example to pass these strings to a search engine
> not supporting RegExp (therefore adding such support to it). A program
> can also let user specify sequence of strings using RegExp (filenames to
> process, etc.). If there are other types of expressions for these
> purposes, please let me know.
>
> I know that for some expressions there would be infinite amount of
> matching strings, but these aren't the cases I'm considering. It'd still
> be possible if string length is limited (there might be large but finite
> number of matching strings).

This will give you all (byte-)strings upto a given length which match a
given regular expression. But beware, it can be slow ;)

import re

all_chars = [chr(i) for i in xrange(256)]

def gen_strings(length, alphabet=all_chars):
if length == 1:
for c in alphabet:
yield c
else:
for i in alphabet:
yield c
for s in gen_strings(length - 1, alphabet):
yield c + s

def regex_matches(regex, max_length, alphabet=all_chars):
r = re.compile('(' + regex + r')\Z')
return (s for s in gen_strings(max_length, alphabet) if r.match(s))

Marc