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Solving Not-Substring Constraint withFlat Abstraction

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Programming Languages and Systems (APLAS 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 13008))

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Abstract

Not-substring is currently among the least supported types of string constraints, and existing solvers use only relatively crude heuristics. Yet, not-substring occurs relatively often in practical examples and is useful in encoding other types of constraints. In this paper, we propose a systematic way to solve not-substring using based on flat abstraction. In this framework, the domain of string variables is restricted to flat languages and subsequently the whole constraints can be expressed as linear arithmetic formulae. We show that non-substring constraints can be flattened efficiently, and provide experimental evidence that the proposed solution for not-substring is competitive with the state of the art string solvers.

This work has been supported by the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports ERC.CZ project LL1908, the FIT BUT internal project FIT-S-20-6427, Guangdong Science and Technology Department grant (No. 2018B010107004), the NSFC grants (No. 61872340), and the INRIA-CAS joint research project VIP.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    More precisely, “replace all” constraints [5] and string-integer conversion constraints [3] are not covered by these common set of constraints. Nevertheless, both have been systematically discussed in recent years.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/alan23273850/py-conbyte.

  3. 3.

    Our implementation however handles cycle counts k larger than one directly.

  4. 4.

    The github link will be made available after the double blind review process.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/CVC4/CVC4/releases/tag/1.8.

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3/releases/tag/z3-4.8.9.

  7. 7.

    https://github.com/alan23273850/py-conbyte.

  8. 8.

    https://github.com/biopython/biopython.

  9. 9.

    https://github.com/django/django.

  10. 10.

    https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Parosh Aziz Abdulla & Mohamed Faouzi Atig

  2. Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

    Yu-Fang Chen, Bui Phi Diep, Wei-Lun Tsai & Di-De Yen

  3. Brno University of Technology, Brno, Czech Republic

    Lukáš Holík

  4. State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Denghang Hu & Zhillin Wu

Authors
  1. Parosh Aziz Abdulla
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  2. Mohamed Faouzi Atig
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  3. Yu-Fang Chen
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  4. Bui Phi Diep
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  5. Lukáš Holík
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  6. Denghang Hu
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  7. Wei-Lun Tsai
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  8. Zhillin Wu
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  9. Di-De Yen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yu-Fang Chen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Korea University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

    Hakjoo Oh

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Abdulla, P.A. et al. (2021). Solving Not-Substring Constraint withFlat Abstraction. In: Oh, H. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13008. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89051-3_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89051-3_17

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