Complete weight enumerators for several classes of two-weight and three-weight linear codes

Abstract: In this paper, for an odd prime $p$, by extending Li et al.'s construction \cite{CL2016}, several classes of two-weight and three-weight linear codes over the finite field $\mathbb{F}_p$ are constructed from a defining set, and then their complete weight enumerators are determined by using Weil sums. Furthermore, we show that some examples of these codes are optimal or almost optimal with respect to the Griesmer bound. Our results generalize the corresponding results in \cite{CL2016, GJ2019}.