as a server-side regex parser, how do you handle catastrophic backtracking? http... | Hacker News

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		brey on Oct 17, 2013 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Regex101: online regexp tester and debugger as a server-side regex parser, how do you handle catastrophic backtracking? http://www.regular-expressions.info/catastrophic.html this seems to handle /(x+x+)+y/ and 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx' gracefully - this should take exponential time (in the number of 'x's) to resolve. edit: seems you don't ... PHP (PCRE) is fine (php handles this well?), javascript is presumably just using my own CPU, but selecting Python allows me to use arbitrary server CPU ... sorry about that ;) edit2: HN comments tend to focus on the negative ... pathological input handling aside, I really like it.

Lindrian on Oct 17, 2013 [–]

Hello

I'm the creator. PCRE offers a neat feature to limit backtracking, Python does not. I still havent found a decent solution to this issue.

Javascript is run in your own browser so you'll only be screwing yourself there :p

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