Automatically Generating Regular Expressions with Genetic Programming

As a proof of concept, the researchers set up a publicly available web site called Regex Generator at http://regex.inginf.units.it/ You do so by entering a piece of text and then highlighting the segments to be extracted. After the minimum requirements in the length of text and the number of matches to extract (requires a minimum of 25 highlighted items) are satisfied,the'Evolve!' button becomes enabled. By pressing it you start a run and let the engine come up with the regular expression suitable for the task.