10. The apparatus of claim 9 , wherein transforming the regular expression into the final automaton further comprises machine readable instructions to: generate the final automaton by replacing an edge in the second intermediate automaton based on the word or non-word boundary symbols  or B, respectively, by an ε edge, where the ε edge is an edge which can be taken without consuming a character in the input string.
9. The apparatus of claim 8 , wherein transforming the regular expression into the final automaton further comprises machine readable instructions to: use the first intermediate automaton to generate a second intermediate automaton determined by a cross-product of the first intermediate automaton and an automaton that accepts strings over the extended alphabet but does not accept strings over the extended alphabet that include substrings of the form selected from B, B, ww, wBW, WW, and  WBw, strings that begin with W or Bw, and strings that end in  W or wB, where  is a word boundary symbol, B is a non-word boundary symbol, w represents any word character and W represents any non-word character.