1. In a computing environment, a method performed at least in part on at least one processor, comprising processing a regular expression or pattern into a symbolic finite automaton, including labeling a transition by a formula representing a set of characters corresponding to a character range.
1. In a computing environment, a method performed at least in part on at least one processor, comprising processing a regular expression or pattern into a symbolic finite automaton, including labeling a transition by a formula representing a set of characters corresponding to a character range. 2. The method of claim 1 wherein processing the regular expression or pattern into the symbolic finite automaton comprises, performing epsilon elimination on an epsilon symbolic finite automaton obtained from processing the regular expression, performing determinization to obtain a deterministic symbolic finite automata, and performing minimization on the deterministic symbolic finite automaton to obtain a minimal deterministic symbolic finite automaton.