INTRODUCTION:
This is the Regular expression Compressing Parser library.
Most regular expression based tools offer matching, which allows certain
substrings to be identified. Parsing gives an entire parsetree with respect to
the given grammar, which holds more information.
This library considers a regular expression as a (regular) parsing grammar, and
the result og 'matching' is thus not a fixed set of substrings, but a
parsetree. The parsetree is given in a compressed format called a bit-code,
which uses the information in the regular expression, to compactly represent
the parsetree. Often this representation will be more compact than the ASCII
represnetation of the string.

There are multiple approaches to regular expression based parsing, and this
library offers the most efficient known algorithms.
- frca is a version of the table based algorithm by Frisch and Cardelli.
- dfa is a version of the DFA based algorithm by Dubé and Feeley.
- dfasim is a veriant of dfa, where the DFA nodes and edges are generated by need.
Also two versions of the backtracking algorithm are implemented

This software is written by Lasse Nielsen(lasse.nielsen.dk<at>gmail<dot>com),
and distributed under the GNU GPL v.3 or later.

This means that it is perfectly legal to obtain, use, study and develop this
software, as long as the same rights are given for the derived products.

Information about the GNU GPL can be found at the Free Software Foundation
(www.fsf.org) or more specifically at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

INSTALLATION:
To install the library, make sure the dependancies are installed, and then type
-make config
-make build
-sudo make install
This will install the library.

To build the test-application go to the programs folder and write
-make config
-make build
This will build the test-application rcpmatch.

To test the installation simply write
-./rcpmatch dfasim compress '(a*b)*+a*a' 'aaaa'
This should use the dfasim algorithm to parse the string 'aaaa' wrt. the regular
expression '(a*b)*+a*a'.
If you wish to try the backtracking algorithm which is used by most regular
expression engines, simply try
-./rcpmatch re compress '(a*b)*+a*a' 'aaaa'
but be warned, that if the number of a's is increased, the algorithm quickly
becomes slow.