Re: [privoxy-devel] Regexp in domain strings

[Fabian K. <fre...@fa...>]

About a year ago, Fabian Keil <fre...@fa...> wrote:

> Adam Piggott <ad...@pr...> wrote:
> 
> > I've always wondered why regexps in the domain string are so limited,
> > such as not being able to use [abc], (yes|no|maybe), etc. Supporting
> > this would cut down my actions file quite considerably.
> > 
> > I figured there must be a good reason but haven't been able to find any
> > discussion on it, any takers?
> 
> Andreas gave some of his reasons in this thread:
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=1758329&forum_id=1690
> 
> Note, however, that he mainly argues against using one large
> PCRE for the whole URL, not against keeping domain, path and port
> separate, but to use PCRE for the domain string as well.
> 
> I think doing the latter has several advantages
> and should be done sooner or later, but of course
> someone has to step up and actually do it.

Unless there are any objections, I will start working
on this once Privoxy-Regression-Test is able to verify
that the default.action file sections do what they are
supposed to do.
 
> If there are good reasons against it, I'd like to
> hear about them as well. Andreas mentions "speed",
> but I don't think it really matters here.
>
> Without any benchmarks it's hard to know if it's
> true anyway. I would assume that PCRE is heavily
> optimised and it might even be faster than Privoxy's
> own matching. It would probably also reduce the number
> of URL patterns we need and thus could speed-up things
> again.
> 
> As mentioned above, I don't think URL pattern matching
> is currently a bottleneck anyway and even if PCRE would
> be a bit slower it might not be noticeable.

I still think that it doesn't matter from a performance
point of view and expect the biggest disadvantage to be
that dots in domains would have to be escaped.

Fabian