Thread: Simple regular expression to find word in a string?

Hey,

I have assignment to do for class and the beginning part is to design a regular expression as follows:

Over the alphabet Σ of ASCII characters, define a Regular Expression that describes a search for the string “coconut”. You can use the expression Σ* to denote an arbitrary sequence of characters in Σ.

This makes me think its appropriate to do E*(coconut)E*. Any arbitrary characters, followed by "coconut", followed by any arbitrary characters? Am I totally missing something or is this correct?

Thanks for any advice.

BC

Looks like a plan to me. You can try to make it less readable, I suppose. And it might be based on the "format" you use for regexes; do you necessarily need the Σ*?