As someone who makes much of his living rehabilitating old perl scripts, please, if you must use such things, use them like this: [ -~] #match only printable characters It takes 5 seconds longer and with regexes, just knowing what the damn thing is trying to do is half the battle. When you use a regex, use a comment. Its the civil thing to do.
My favorite regex of all time
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Re: My favorite regex of all time
#12Are people seriously still deliberately using ASCII-reliant code?
Re: My favorite regex of all time
#13As someone who makes much of his living rehabilitating old perl scripts, please, if you must use such things, use them like this: [ -~] #match only printable characters It takes 5 seconds longer and with regexes, just knowing what the damn thing is trying to do is half the battle. When you use a regex, use a comment. Its the civil thing to do.
or even better # Match only printable ASCII characters.
The worst case is when the original author never really had it clear in his/her mind what exactly that compound regex was trying to accomplish. They just kind of bodged and hacked till the usual input stream started coming out right. Trying to write a clear comment on the purpose of the regex helps with that too.
Re: My favorite regex of all time
#14This will not only miss non-ascii printing characters, but it's not even much shorter than typing [[:print:]] to use the explicit character class.
I used this once as another safeguard against pushing binary data into the database. It was a poor system to begin with where you even have that possibility... and it happened at least once before the fix and my safeguard was in place.
Re: My favorite regex of all time
#15As someone who makes much of his living rehabilitating old perl scripts, please, if you must use such things, use them like this: [ -~] #match only printable characters It takes 5 seconds longer and with regexes, just knowing what the damn thing is trying to do is half the battle. When you use a regex, use a comment. Its the civil thing to do.
or even better # Match only printable ASCII characters.
Re: My favorite regex of all time
#16As someone who makes much of his living rehabilitating old perl scripts, please, if you must use such things, use them like this: [ -~] #match only printable characters It takes 5 seconds longer and with regexes, just knowing what the damn thing is trying to do is half the battle. When you use a regex, use a comment. Its the civil thing to do.
Re: My favorite regex of all time
#17Are people seriously still deliberately using ASCII-reliant code?
Re: My favorite regex of all time
#18Are people seriously still deliberately using ASCII-reliant code?
Re: My favorite regex of all time
#19As someone who makes much of his living rehabilitating old perl scripts, please, if you must use such things, use them like this: [ -~] #match only printable characters It takes 5 seconds longer and with regexes, just knowing what the damn thing is trying to do is half the battle. When you use a regex, use a comment. Its the civil thing to do.
Google is by far the best "comment"
Re: My favorite regex of all time
#20As someone who makes much of his living rehabilitating old perl scripts, please, if you must use such things, use them like this: [ -~] #match only printable characters It takes 5 seconds longer and with regexes, just knowing what the damn thing is trying to do is half the battle. When you use a regex, use a comment. Its the civil thing to do.
Google is by far the best "comment"