NFA/DFA implementation in C#

Question

Does anyone know of any good NFA and DFA implementation in C#, possibly implementing as well conversions between both? What I would like would be to be able to construct a NFA and then convert it automatically to a DFA, but without having to write my own code which would take a very long time. There is this Python code which perhaps I could use and integrate with C# using IronPython, but Python is slow.

Gynarchy

Looking that the python code, it should be relatively easy to convert to C#. Have you considered doing that? – Mcgriff

The question is that I understand nothing about Python... – Gynarchy

Slow is relative... anyway, the NFA->DFA algorithm is rather trivial (with some general caveats in general) and is a topic of many Junior CS Automata-Theory courses -- I had to do this :) There any many good links off of "convert NFA to DFA" on google. Look at those relating to courses in particular. It should be less than a day of coding; perhaps only a few an hour or two and likely less painful than trying to hopscotch through different languages. – Beiderbecke

The algorithm to convert NFAs to DFAs is exponential in the number of NFA states in the worst case, so... slow is not going to be a phenomenon due to Python. – Boots

You may also want to look at project Fare. https://mcmap.net/q/501927/-convert-nfa-to-dfa/… – Adventurism

Answer 1

Take a look at my series of posts about this subject:

Regular Expression Engine in C# (the Story)

Regex engine in C# - the Regex Parser

Regex engine in C# - the NFA

Regex engine in C# - the DFA

Regex engine in C# - matching strings

Fullmouthed

I would like to use your code, but it does not have a license listed. If you are ok with people using it, would you distribute a version with an explicit license? – Mastat

@FireLizzard you can use it the way you want. In my blog I have included a Creative Commons badge right below my G+ profile. :) Feel free to use the code. – Fullmouthed