concatenation

Concatenation on Words

Let $a,b$ be two words. Loosely speaking, the concatenation, or juxtaposition of $a$ and $b$ is the word of the form $ab$. In order to define this rigorously, let us first do a little review of what words are.

Let $\mathrm{\Sigma }$ be a set whose elements we call letters (we also call $\mathrm{\Sigma }$ an alphabet). A (finite) word or a string on $\mathrm{\Sigma }$ is a partial function $w:\mathbb{N}\to \mathrm{\Sigma }$, (where $\mathbb{N}$ is the set of natural numbers), such that, if $\mathrm{dom}(w)\ne \mathrm{\varnothing }$, then there is an $n\in \mathbb{N}$ such that

$$w\text{ is }\{\begin{array}{cc}\text{defined for every }m\le n,\hfill & \\ \text{undefined otherwise.}\hfill & \end{array}$$

This $n$ is necessarily unique, and is called the length of the word $w$. The length of a word $w$ is usually denoted by $|w|$. The word whose domain is $\mathrm{\varnothing }$, the empty set, is called the empty word, and is denoted by $\lambda$. It is easy to see that $|\lambda |=0$. Any element in the range of $w$ has the form $w(i)$, but it is more commonly written $w_i$. If a word $w$ is not the empty word, then we may write it as $w_1{w}_2\mathrm{\cdots }{w}_n$, where $n=|w|$. The collection of all words on $\mathrm{\Sigma }$ is denoted ${\mathrm{\Sigma }}^{*}$ (the asterisk ${}^{*}$ is commonly known as the Kleene star operation of a set). Using the definition above, we see that $\lambda \in {\mathrm{\Sigma }}^{*}$.

Now we define a binary operation $\circ$ on ${\mathrm{\Sigma }}^{*}$, called the concatenation on the alphabet $\mathrm{\Sigma }$, as follows: let $v,w\in {\mathrm{\Sigma }}^{*}$ with $m=|v|$ and $n=|w|$. Then $\circ (v,w)$ is the partial function whose domain is the set $\{1,\mathrm{\dots },m,m+1,\mathrm{\dots },m+n\}$, such that

The partial function $\circ (v,w)$ is written $v\circ w$, or simply $vw$, when it does not cause any confusion. Therefore, if $v=v_1\mathrm{\cdots }{v}_m$ and $w=w_1\mathrm{\cdots }{w}_n$, then $vw=v_1\mathrm{\cdots }{v}_m{w}_1\mathrm{\cdots }{w}_n$.

Below are some simple properties of $\circ$ on words:

• $\circ$ is associative: $(uv)w=u(vw)$.

• $\lambda w=w\lambda =w$.

• As a result, ${\mathrm{\Sigma }}^{*}$ together with $\circ$ is a monoid.

• $vw=\lambda$ iff $v=w=\lambda$.

• As a result, ${\mathrm{\Sigma }}^{*}$ is never a group unless ${\mathrm{\Sigma }}^{*}=\{\lambda \}$.

• If $a=bc$ where $a$ is a letter, then one of $b,c$ is $a$, and the other the empty word $\lambda$.

• If $ab=cd$ where $a,b,c,d$ are letters, then $a=c$ and $b=d$.

Concatenation on Languages

The concatenation operation $\circ$ over an alphabet $\mathrm{\Sigma }$ can be extended to operations on languages over $\mathrm{\Sigma }$. Suppose $A,B$ are two languages over $\mathrm{\Sigma }$, we define

$$A\circ B:=\{u\circ v\mid u\in A,v\in B\}.$$

When there is no confusion, we write $AB$ for $A\circ B$.

Below are some simple properties of $\circ$ on languages:

• $(AB)C=A(BC)$; i.e. (http://planetmath.org/Ie), concatenation of sets of letters is associative.

• Because of the associativity of $\circ$, we can inductively define $A^n$ for any positive integer $n$, as $A^1=A$, and $A^{n+1}=A^{n}A$.

• It is not hard to see that ${\mathrm{\Sigma }}^{*}=\{\lambda \}\cup \mathrm{\Sigma }\cup {\mathrm{\Sigma }}^2\cup \mathrm{\cdots }\cup {\mathrm{\Sigma }}^n\cup \mathrm{\cdots }$.

Remark. A formal language containing the empty word, and is closed under concatenation is said to be monoidal, since it has the structure of a monoid.

Title	concatenation
Canonical name	Concatenation
Date of creation	2013-03-22 17:16:38
Last modified on	2013-03-22 17:16:38
Owner	CWoo (3771)
Last modified by	CWoo (3771)
Numerical id	17
Author	CWoo (3771)
Entry type	Definition
Classification	msc 20M35
Classification	msc 68Q70
Synonym	juxtaposition
Synonym	monoidal
Related topic	Word
Defines	length
Defines	length of a word
Defines	monoidal language