[staticshock]

"aaa" is a valid regex that matches the string "aaa". If you have special characters in your source string, many libraries have a regex for escaping them. So, generating a regex to match your exact string is trivial. Even matching a group of strings is trivial via (aaa|bbb|etc), though it gets long.

Given that, what I think you're really asking is, "how do I automatically generate a regex of optimal conciseness given a set of inputs I'd like to match, and maybe a bunch of other inputs I want to avoid matching?"

This looks like it iteratively does what you want: http://regex.inginf.units.it/ (Note that when I went there, it said "6 slots available", presumably because everything runs server-side. If a bunch of people pile in there, you probably won't actually be able to test it due to limited resources on their part.)

[mc_hammer]

this is very cool ty for the post.