Automata From Regular Expressions
Overview and Usage
This is a python program to contruct e-NFA, DFA, and minimised DFA from a given regular expression, built as a class project for Formal Language and Automata Theory.
It requires the python programming language: Python 2.7 (http://python.org/download/)
The program can be run by passing the regex as a command line argument: python cli.py "(0+1)*+01*0"
Alternately, you can use the GUI built using the Tkinter Library: python gui.py
You may get a 'command not found' error in Windows, which means python is not in your PATH. Check out how to add python to your path here: http://superuser.com/questions/143119/how-to-add-python-to-the-windows-path
The program also has the ability to create graphs from the built automata. For that, it requires:
- The GraphViz software to actually create the graphs. Get it from http://www.graphviz.org/Download.php. (This is a ~50MB download, but worth it!)
- The Python Imaging Library (PIL) to read the png images into Tkinter. Get it from http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/index.htm.
Ubuntu users can install them by running sudo apt-get install python-imaging-tk graphviz
Checkout the included screenshots. The GUI is not the best in the world, but it gets the work done :)
Acknowledgements
- Prof S.K. Saha, for the project idea and concepts of Automata Theory
- https://github.com/max99x/automata-editor, for general ideas and esp. for showing how to use GraphViz
- The wonderful community over at http://stackoverflow.com, for helping get past all bottlenecks
- The very helpful documentation of Tkinter at http://effbot.org/tkinterbook/
License
GNU GPLv3