Regular expression to show that all strings contain each symbol atleast once

Question

I'm studying for my exam and I came across the following exam question from last year, the only way I know how to solve this is build a regex that accounts for all six different series of letters so for example to recognize a string that has the letters a,b and c occur in that order:

$(a+b+c)^*a(a+b+c)^*b(a+b+c)^*c$

The question: Give a regular expression r over the alphabet A = {a, b, c} such that the language determined by r consists of all strings that contain at least one occurrence of each symbol in A. Brieﬂy explain your answer.

I think an alternation of six terms of the form $a(a)b(a+b)c(a+b+c)$ is easier to explain. BTW: What has been your* question? — greybeard, Dec 28 '19 at 16:44
@greybeard: yeah, i belatedly got that. I deleted my comment while thinking about how to prove that formulation in a way that justifies "easier to explain" since it seems to me that OP's formulation requires very little explanation at all. — rici, Dec 30 '19 at 07:17
@greybeard: The big advantage of yours, it seems to me, is not ease of explanation but rather the fact that it leads to a deterministic grammar. OP's expression is a classic example of exponential state blowup of the standard regex->NFA->DFA algorithm. — rici, Dec 30 '19 at 07:32

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 03 '14 at 23:23

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Your solution looks good to me, and it is probably what they expect of you.

It is interesting to consider the more general question: how large does a regular expression for this language be, as a function of the size of the alphabet? Denoting the size of the alphabet by $n$, Theorem 9 here shows a lower bound of $\Omega(c^n)$ for some (explicit) $c > 1$. (The theorem is for context-free grammars, but a regular expression can be translated to a context-free grammar.) Your construction is $O(n\cdot n!) = 2^{O(n\log n)}$, so there is a some gap here.

answered Mar 03 '14 at 23:23

Yuval Filmus

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But cba is not in the OP’s language?! – D. Ben Knoble Dec 28 '19 at 14:53
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The regular expression in the post is only one among six different summands. Please read the post carefully. – Yuval Filmus Dec 28 '19 at 15:04
indeed, I suspected that to be the case, but the language was unclear enough to leave me wondering. Oh well. Were I a grader, I would have expected something more definite – D. Ben Knoble Dec 28 '19 at 15:16

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Dec 31 '19 at 02:13

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Spelling out the six alternatives in their most symmetrical form:
(a+b+c)* a (a+b+c)* b (a+b+c)* c (a+b+c)* +
(a+b+c)* a (a+b+c)* c (a+b+c)* b (a+b+c)* +
(a+b+c)* b (a+b+c)* a (a+b+c)* c (a+b+c)* +
(a+b+c)* b (a+b+c)* c (a+b+c)* a (a+b+c)* +
(a+b+c)* c (a+b+c)* a (a+b+c)* b (a+b+c)* +
(a+b+c)* c (a+b+c)* b (a+b+c)* a (a+b+c)*

edited Dec 31 '19 at 02:13

greybeard

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answered Dec 29 '19 at 16:50

Shreyansh Gupta

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Thanks for answering. However, we're not looking for answers that consist solely of an equation or regular expression; we'd like you to support your answer with explanation of how you got it or rationale or justification that it is correct. Can you [edit] your answer accordingly? Thank you! – D.W. Dec 29 '19 at 20:30

Regular expression to show that all strings contain each symbol atleast once

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