The present invention extends to methods, systems, and computer program products for decomposing and merging regular expressions. Embodiments of the invention decompose a regular expression into multiple simple keyword graphs, merge those keyword graphs in a compact and efficient manner, and produce a directed acyclic graph (DAG) that can execute a simplified regular expression alphabet. Several of these regular expression DAG's can then be merged together to produce a single DAG that represents an entire collection of regular expressions. DAGs along with other text processing algorithms and a heap collection can be combined in a multi-pass approach to expand the regular expression alphabet.