Talk:208: Regular Expressions

Hi, sorry about the previous "poor explanation". This one is pretty straight-forward (I think), given enough information about "regex"es and Perl. On a side-note, how did you find out the date for the comic? -- NariOx

The explanation was mostly accurate, my gripe was with the fact that a number of fields were empty - the transcript, date and categories weren't done. You can find the date in the "all comics" page, accessible from the sidebar. Davidy²²[talk] 23:26, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

*Grumble grumble*, email should be intrinsically treated as 7-bit ASCII. 200MB of email would be almost 210 million bytes, raw. Even assuming half of that is header overheads on top of a whole lot of short message bodies, that's a lot more characters still to processed than 5 million. Of course, if people send more complex data through common MIME extensions (or the old favourites of uuencoding, etc) so as to send extended characters and binary-attachments (including various compressed formats of data, but again needing significant overheads when not containing large documents within), then that reduces the amount of characters needing searching (but probably needs a few more "use <foo>::<bar>;" bits on your Perl code, in order to give you the tools to isolate such blocks and decode what's in them for further searching within). But things went downhill ever since people could start sending emails with fancy graphical signatures and backgrounds... Yeah, I'm an Old Fogey from the dark ages. 178.98.31.27 00:00, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

I don't think a regex can isolate an address, it has so many forms that it can not be considered regular language. This discussion comes to similar conclusions: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9397485/regex-street-address-match 108.162.246.117 05:41, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

It's an EMAIL address they're trying to match. Not quite obvious if you're not already thinking emails. At the same time, you COULD most likely catch a lot of the most common street address types, like 1234 Name Rd/St/Ave/etc. 173.245.56.189 00:52, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

No. "But to find them we'd need to search through 200MB of emails looking for something formatted like an address!" To find someone you need a physical address, not an email address. --197.234.242.240 14:48, 30 January 2015 (UTC)