Hi all,
We’ve added a new post in our series on regular expressions and all the interesting things that can go wrong with them:
We’ve been working recently on writing rules for detecting errors in regular expressions in Java code. Regular expressions are a common feature of modern programming languages, and it’s easy to take them for granted. By their very nature they pack a lot of power into terse little packages and unfortunately that introduces a lot of room for error. In my last post I talked about the kinds of errors our newly implemented rule about character classes found in open source code. Today, I’ll talk about boundaries, another regex feature that can lead to bugs when used incorrectly, and a rule of ours that can help you avoid such issues. I’ll also talk about complexity and maintainability in regular expressions and our rule that can help you find regular expressions that are too complex.
Read the rest in the blog.
Ann