3 ms·

I’d like to imagine that as long as we live, poorly written regular expressions will continue to be the cause of breaking issues.

• lmkg 7y ago
  StackOverflow also had an outage a few years ago that was caused by exponential blow-up of a backtracking regular expression. https://stackstatus.net/post/147710624694/outage-postmortem-july-20-2016 https://stackstatus.net/post/147710624694/outage-postmortem-...
  • isaacg 7y ago
    That blow up is quadratic, not exponential: "This is not classic catastrophic backtracking (talk on backtracking) (performance is O(n²), not exponential, in length), but it was enough."
    • perlgeek 7y ago
      Some years ago I tried to create an exponential time regex in Perl, and only managed a quadratic time one after a bit of experimenting. But, as you said, quadratic is often already fatal on realistic data.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]