I am not sure why perl would be mentioned in this context, since it came really, really late to this game. The first release of perl was in 1987. Regular expressions were spread across the CS curriculum by the mid 1970s - for example in lex and yacc. Even if you didn't learn it in class many folks worked with it using ed and sed and vi by the mid '70s.
«This meant that sites such as “microsoft.com,” “reddit.com,” and even Russia’s own state media outlet “rt.com” were rendered suddenly inaccessible.»
It’s really not a good idea in when discussing regex and literal text to include extraneous characters like commas in the quoted examples. “microsoft.com,” is not a valid domain.
Well, the “t.co” problem probably wasn’t a regex. If they were naive enough to misuse a regex, they likely would have just used “t.co” itself in which the “.” stands for any character at all. They probably just did a simple search for those characters. Conversely, with a proper regex, it would be easy to search only at the end of the string!
Verbal expression is also a fun read, how people want to clarify regex with syntactic sugar.
I am not sure why perl would be mentioned in this context, since it came really, really late to this game. The first release of perl was in 1987. Regular expressions were spread across the CS curriculum by the mid 1970s - for example in lex and yacc. Even if you didn't learn it in class many folks worked with it using ed and sed and vi by the mid '70s.
small typo: looks like you forgot to escape the period in a regex. So instead of "^t.co$", it should be "^t\.co$".
Just goes to show that regexes are tricky!
«This meant that sites such as “microsoft.com,” “reddit.com,” and even Russia’s own state media outlet “rt.com” were rendered suddenly inaccessible.»
It’s really not a good idea in when discussing regex and literal text to include extraneous characters like commas in the quoted examples. “microsoft.com,” is not a valid domain.
Well, the “t.co” problem probably wasn’t a regex. If they were naive enough to misuse a regex, they likely would have just used “t.co” itself in which the “.” stands for any character at all. They probably just did a simple search for those characters. Conversely, with a proper regex, it would be easy to search only at the end of the string!
I'm sure you've heard this a lot by now, but "a*b*" is not the regex for the grammar you described. It should be "|ab|*".