Hover Text:

Wait, forgot to escape a space. Wheeeeee[taptaptap]eeeeee!

Transcript

[in a yellow box:]
Whenever I learn a new skill I concoct elaborate fantasy scenarios where it lets me save the day.

Megan: Oh no! The killer must have followed her on vacation!
[Megan points to computer.]
Megan: But to find them we’d have to search through 200 MB of emails looking for something formatted like an address!
Cueball: It’s hopeless!

Off-panel voice: Everybody stand back.

Off-panel voice: I know regular expressions.

[A man swings in on a rope, toward the computer.]

tap tap
The word PERL! appears in a bubble.

[The man swings away, and the other characters cheer.]

      • elvith@feddit.de
        16·
        10 months ago

        Who’s gonna tell them? I’d do it but I’m still busy parsing HTML with regex… it’s working any minute now!

        • otacon239@feddit.de
          2·
          10 months ago

          What am I missing? I typically used it as a sanity check and would vet the changes. Never as a one-click modify. Or is there something else I should know about?

            • otacon239@feddit.de
              6·
              10 months ago

              Ah, yeah. It was never meant to be a be all and all. Just something to clean up the complete trash before I started proofreading. Besides, these were emails the customer provided and could easily be changed afterwords. Their fault if we get bad emails in the list ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

              • elvith@feddit.de
                1·
                10 months ago

                You’re completely correct. In practice, it’s usually good enough to just check for “.+@.+” or “.+@.+\…+”. Why? It’s broad enough to allow almost everything and it rejects the most obvious typos. And in the end, the final verification would be to send an email there which contains a link, that one has to click to finalize the signup/change. Even if you had a regex that could filter every possible adress that’s possible according to the standard, you still wouldn’t know whether it really exists.

            • dev_null@lemmy.ml
              4·
              10 months ago

              I wrote a regex that matches 100% of email addresses and had no problems using it. It’s “.+@.+”

              • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                10 months ago

                Meme aside that’s what I’d use tbh. Or the ultimate email validation: just sending the signup email and if they typed an invalid email it won’t send

    • anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      2·
      9 months ago

      While email addresses are technically a regular language but I have seen a the regex that takes up a whole page claiming to be the first standard compliant one.