Regular expression refactoring

Question

Is there such thing as automated regular expression refactoring?

I'm wondering whether there is an online service or utility that can understand and simplify and/or optimise a regex.

e.g.

^[A-Z][A-Z][0-9][0-9][0-9]$ → ^[A-Z]{2}[0-9]{3}$

(Obviously this is an abstract example)

Answer 1

Regular expressions are automata, you can use an algorithm designed to build deterministic finite automaton, it will refactor the original automaton to a simpler one.

I do not know a programming language implementation but you can get inspired with Nondeterministic finite automaton Wikipedia page.