In the field of computation theory, star is one of the regular operations. If A is a language (not necessarily a regular language) then A* (read "A star") is defined as follows.
{x1x2…xk
| k ≥ 0 and each xi ∈ A}
In plain English: A* is the set of all strings made up of any number of consecutive strings in A, including 0.
For example, if A = {0,1},
A* = {ε, 0, 1, 00, 01, 10, 11, 000, 001, 010, 011, …}
Some interesting things to note about the star operation:
- A* always contains the empty string (ε ∈ A)
- A* is a superset, though not necessarily a proper superset, of A* (A* ⊇ A)
- Regular languages are closed under the star operation. This means that if A is a regular language, then so is A*.