An Empirical Study on Regular Expression Bugs
Peipei Wang, Chris Brown, Jamie A. Jennings, Kathryn Thomasset Stolee · 2020
Understanding the nature of regular expression (regex) issues is important to tackle practical issues developers face in regular expression usage. Knowledge about the nature and frequency of various types of regular expression issues, such as those related to performance, API misuse, and code smells, can guide testing, inform documentation writers, and motivate refactoring efforts. However, beyond ReDoS (Regular expression Denial of Service), little is known about to what extent regular expression issues affect software development and how these issues are addressed in practice.