Block-Deterministic Regular Languages

We introduce the notions of blocked, block-marked and blockdeterministic regular expressions. We characterize block-deterministic regular expressions with deterministic Glushkov block automata. The results can be viewed as a generalization of the characterization of one-unambiguous regular expressions with deterministic Glushkov automata. In addition, when a language L has a block-deterministic expression E, we can construct a deterministic finite-state automaton for L that has size linear in the size of E.