Regexes: The Bad, the Better, and the Best
1–10 of 37 posts
Re: Regexes: The Bad, the Better, and the Best
#2How would the regex below compare in this case? That is, modifying the "bad" regex to use the lazy-consumption trick on (almost) all of the `.` patterns.
/.*? (.*?)\[(.*?)\]:.*/Re: Regexes: The Bad, the Better, and the Best
#3Using this Perl module you can walk step-by-step through what a regexp engine actually does given a regexp and a string to match against:
https://metacpan.org/pod/Regexp::Debugger
After installing the module it can be started simply by calling `rxrx` on the command line.
Re: Regexes: The Bad, the Better, and the Best
#4Cool article.
And it was written by the girl! :)
Unusual to find ((young )?(girl|female)) expert in regexes!
Re: Regexes: The Bad, the Better, and the Best
#5The RegexBuddy author has a good article on this same phenomenon, dubbed "catastrophic backtracking": http://www.regular-expressions.info/catastrophic.html
Re: Regexes: The Bad, the Better, and the Best
#6Cool article. And it was written by the girl! :) Unusual to find ((young )?(girl|female)) expert in regexes!
Please don't write comments whose sole purpose is to single out the gender of the author of a story.
Edited
Re: Regexes: The Bad, the Better, and the Best
#7Cool article. And it was written by the girl! :) Unusual to find ((young )?(girl|female)) expert in regexes!
Please don't write comments whose sole purpose is to single out the gender of the author of a story. Edited
Honestly, if you must engage in backseat modding, please at least have the courtesy to explain why you think someone should do something you say. Otherwise people are likely to either just have a negative reaction to you, or if they do what you say, are likely to not understand why. :)
Re: Regexes: The Bad, the Better, and the Best
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't write comments whose sole purpose is to single out the gender of the author of a story. Edited
Honestly, if you must engage in backseat modding, please at least have the courtesy to explain why you think someone should do something you say. Otherwise people are likely to either just have a negative reaction to you, or if they do what you say, are likely to not understand why. :)
I'm not sure what "backseat modding" means. We all help moderate the community; it's why we have vote buttons and flag buttons, both of which are worth using in this case.
Re: Regexes: The Bad, the Better, and the Best
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, if you must engage in backseat modding, please at least have the courtesy to explain why you think someone should do something you say. Otherwise people are likely to either just have a negative reaction to you, or if they do what you say, are likely to not understand why. :)
I'm not sure what "backseat modding" means. We all help moderate the community; it's why we have vote buttons and flag buttons, both of which are worth using in this case.
That is actually a damn good question.
I didn't decide on the word by way or a rational chain of logic, but merely by having hindbrain pattern matching trigger on your behavior, based on what i've seen called that on other forums, and what i've seen you doing on here from time to time. If i had to put it in words, it would probably be something like "tell other people how to use HN without contributing significantly to the discussion at hand", since that is typically the job of actual mods, not of users.
In any case, it's not that i mind you doing it, but if it's done without any explanation it irks me for the aforementioned reasons.
(Note: My brain classifies even my response to your first post here as backseat modding.)
Re: Regexes: The Bad, the Better, and the Best
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what "backseat modding" means. We all help moderate the community; it's why we have vote buttons and flag buttons, both of which are worth using in this case.
That is actually a damn good question. I didn't decide on the word by way or a rational chain of logic, but merely by having hindbrain pattern matching trigger on your behavior, based on what i've seen called that on other forums, and what i've seen you doing on here from time to time. If i had to put it in words, it would probably be something like "tell other people how to use HN without contributing significantly…
I'm doing a lot of things at once. I'm fixing a buggy register allocator, and I'm not that smart, so I can do real work for about 15 minutes before my brain overheats. I bounce to the HN front page: there's a story about regexes, and a recent trend of stories about how there are alternatives to standard regex libraries. I think, maybe this will be one of those stories. Click. Nope, it isn't. I wonder, did anyone write the comment where they point out that rather than tediously optimizing regexes, it's sometimes more profitable just to hand-code a quick lexer? Nope, but, look at this: a creepy comment about "young girls" and regexes. Nope. Flag. Downvote. The comment isn't grey! Someone voted this creepy thing up! Write a quick comment. Back to debugging the world's worst compiler IR.
That's how you end up with an imperfect complaint comment. Oh well! Thanks for motivating me to improve it.
See, the same thing just happened, just now; I vented a little more brain steam, and now can hopefully spend another solid 15 minutes trying to fix this bug. :)