  The hairpin completion is an operation on formal languages that has been
inspired by the hairpin formation in DNA biochemistry and by DNA computing. In
this paper we investigate the hairpin completion of regular languages.
  It is well known that hairpin completions of regular languages are linear
context-free and not necessarily regular. As regularity of a (linear)
context-free language is not decidable, the question arose whether regularity
of a hairpin completion of regular languages is decidable. We prove that this
problem is decidable and we provide a polynomial time algorithm.
  Furthermore, we prove that the hairpin completion of regular languages is an
unambiguous linear context-free language and, as such, it has an effectively
computable growth function. Moreover, we show that the growth of the hairpin
completion is exponential if and only if the growth of the underlying languages
is exponential and, in case the hairpin completion is regular, then the hairpin
completion and the underlying languages have the same growth indicator.
