Hmm, all right. The readability is a good point.Wladimir Palant wrote:Sorry Peng, it really isn't that simple, regular expressions syntax is pretty complicated to parse. Also, the new syntax has an advantage over regular expressions: reading "http://ad\d.server.com/" is easier than reading "/http://ad\d\.server\.com/". The dot is most problematic when writing regular expressions, it is very common in addresses and escaping it makes the filter hard to read (not to mention that forgetting to escape the dot is a very common mistake). Regular expressions also seem to encourage filters like "///([^/]+\.)?ad(ima?ge?|manager|se?rv.*|stream|v|vert.*|x)?s?-?\d*\.(?!.+\.edu|jp/|$)/", something I want to get rid of.
In the end nobody is forced to use the new syntax, if it is only used by the deregifier and the (still theoretical) automatic filter generator - I am fine with it.
Sounds good, then. It'll be nice to be able to replace "*" with "\d{+}" in a few of my simple filters to be more exact.