Resource for generating shortest regex given a list of strings I'm looking for a program such that, given a finite list of strings, can find short regexes to match exactly all of them and nothing else.
Since there are multiple languages that express regexes differently, there can correspondingly be multiple regex generators. Each answer must discuss regex generation in one langauge only (or a family of languages for which there is a direct correspondence between regexes in each of them).
The Machine Learning Lab at the University of Trieste, Italy, wrote a web app to solve this exact problem, available at: Automatic Generation of Regular Expressions from Examples based on &quot;genetic programming&quot; and published a paper about it. Based on the fact that it had to come from the Machine Learning Lab of a university in Italy, and was worth publishing a paper about, it is probably a pretty hard problem to solve. Doesn't sound like the type of question for Code Golf SE, but I'm new here, so I wouldn't be the expert on that.