Some explanation of what to do and what flavor of "regex" syntax is accepted would be good. I'm guessing it's a javascript syntax, but I don't really remember how different it is from pcre, does it have lookahead/lookbehind assertions and all that. Also cloudflare's free ssl doesn't work everywhere, letsencrypt is better at that and also free. Had to open the thing in chrome.
Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions
21–30 of 41 posts
Re: Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions
#22My strategy of "capture the last two characters of each input in the accept group followed by $" hasn't failed yet, and is quick to input and requires no thought. Though I wouldn't say I'm practicing any practical RegEx skills doing so. :P
My strategy was ^[].*[^]$ where you first fill in all the first letters of the match words and then all the last characters of the skip group. Works fairly well. I'm not sure if there is a length limit, but I'm fairly sure I could come up with a vim macro/regex that would allow me to copy the match words and make a (list|like|so) within 45 seconds. Give the time limit, it would be more fun to automatically let your s…
I think you just beat me at my own game.
Re: Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions
#23I'm a bit confused - I'm not sure I understand the practicality of this. I do like challenging regexps, but I did not find them here. I thought the point of code games is to practice a skill you could use in real life, but matching random bags of words while avoiding other random groups of words isn't something one would use regexps for.
Apologies if I misunderstood the point of this.
Re: Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions
#24This game would be better if it was like a pacman style cave with random letters or whatever, and you had to write a regex to get to the other side without running into an enemy
Re: Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions
#25Sorry, this will be a negative review. This is easily the most frustrating game I've ever played. I can't test parenthesis because it tells me my time 'ran out' with 45 seconds on the clock. I could barely type 4 or 5 characters. Edit: There are also XSS issues with the player name, you can execute Javascript in the other player's window. That's not good. I confirmed this since an image I scripted to load via HTML (…
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Re: Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions
#26My strategy of "capture the last two characters of each input in the accept group followed by $" hasn't failed yet, and is quick to input and requires no thought. Though I wouldn't say I'm practicing any practical RegEx skills doing so. :P
My strategy was ^[].*[^]$ where you first fill in all the first letters of the match words and then all the last characters of the skip group. Works fairly well. I'm not sure if there is a length limit, but I'm fairly sure I could come up with a vim macro/regex that would allow me to copy the match words and make a (list|like|so) within 45 seconds. Give the time limit, it would be more fun to automatically let your s…
> Write a function that, given two arrays of words, return the best regex.
I've actually done that with code-golf in the past. I needed a regex shorter than n that would match what I wanted it to match, so I generated valid regexes up to n length and tested them. A bit brute-force, but eventually saved me one character in the program.
Re: Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions
#27Spoiler warning: super-strategy below.
Not a bad idea but since there's no penalty for long strings I can win pretty much instantly by treating it as a typing test and typing a short (probably-unique) substring from each match separated by |. It'll get me an instant-win but if for some reason it matches some non-matches I make it a little longer. Here's a screen grab of me winning with this super-strategy. on this run for some reason you'll notice there's a bug at the end but normally it just lets me win with no chance for the other person to score. I'm not sure how you could address this... If you keep it this way it just becomes a typing test...
Re: Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions
#28There's definitely a bug in the timing. I feel like it's related to the previous round. Whenever I finished a round early, the next round timed out early.
Also, it should be revamped to always run the full time and award points to the shortest regex. I regularly won rounds with entries like `foo|bar|...` Easy to write, and requiring almost no skill.
Re: Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions
#29Spoiler warning: super-strategy below. Not a bad idea but since there's no penalty for long strings I can win pretty much instantly by treating it as a typing test and typing a short (probably-unique) substring from each match separated by |. It'll get me an instant-win but if for some reason it matches some non-matches I make it a little longer. Here's a screen grab of me winning with this super-strategy. on this ru…
It's more comfortable / fast make a JS that concatenates the strings (class .match) with pipe separator.
Re: Show HN: RegEx Face Off – Beat your friends with regular expressions
#30Spoiler warning: super-strategy below. Not a bad idea but since there's no penalty for long strings I can win pretty much instantly by treating it as a typing test and typing a short (probably-unique) substring from each match separated by |. It'll get me an instant-win but if for some reason it matches some non-matches I make it a little longer. Here's a screen grab of me winning with this super-strategy. on this ru…
It's more comfortable / fast make a JS that concatenates the strings (class .match) with pipe separator.
but I didn't "cheat" - I literally typed by hand a regex for the matches but not the non-matches. (Exactly as was asked.) I guess a way to fix this would be to make it like "regex golf" where there is a fixed time but the shortest overall regex wins... It could also be defeated if most substrings of each match were also in the things to avoid. For example if you're supposed to match cat but avoid catch then my strategy would be defeated. I would have to addd ^cat$ -- which wouuld cost me time and characters. :)