Patent ID: 7818311

Claim:
A regular expression system, comprising at least one processor coupled to at least one machine-readable storage medium storing instructions executable by the at least one processor to implement: a rule compilation component configured to receive a specification of primitive rules and to generate a complex regular expression based on the specification of primitive rules, and to detect at least a circular reference and a missing definition; a regular expression engine configured to receive the complex regular expression and textual data, and to compare the textual data to the complex regular expression to obtain matching data; wherein the rule compilation component includes a regular expression grammar component, and a translator component configured to translate the specification of primitive rules, based on a grammar provided by the regular expression grammar component, into the complex regular expression, by recursively locating non-terminal rule representations and converting the non-terminal rule representations into the complex regular expression, the complex regular expression being a terminal regular expression; and an assistance component configured to at least one of interpret or utilize an alternate representation of a language grammar, to infer a rule relating to at least one of parsing or color-coding a language.