Re: [privoxy-users] [3.0.14] How to disable greediness?

[Lee <le...@gm...>]

On 7/26/09, Gilles <cod...@fr...> wrote:
> Hello
>
> It took me a while to figure out that the following regex is greedy:
>
> #GREEDY
> s|(<font color=\#[^>].+?>JohnDoe</font>)|<span class=myclass>$1</span>|gs
>
> ie. "[^>].+?>" doesn't tell Privoxy to skip all characters until it
> finds the first occurence of ">"; Instead, it kept going forth until it
>
> As a work-around, I used this more restrictive regex:
>
> #GOOD
> s|(<font color=\#.{6}>JohnDoe</font>)|<span class=myclass>$1</span>|gs
>
> Still, I'm curious to understand why the former doesn't work as
> expected (ie. "[^>].+?>" doesn't succeed in having Privoxy skip all
> characters until it finds the first occurence of ">").
>
> Thank you for any hint.

hrmm...  after a quick look thru the privoxy documentation I couldn't
find it either - but take a look at the start of default.filter:

# Note2: In addition to the Perl options gimsx, the following nonstandard
# options are supported:
#
# 'U' turns the default to ungreedy matching.  Add ? to quantifiers to
#     switch back to greedy.

so change the options from "gs" to "gsU" to get ungreedy matching.  eg:
s@<iframe\s+[^>]* title="Advertisement" [^>]*>.*</iframe>@\
  <!-- Privoxy removed Advertisement iframe -->@gisU

Regards,
Lee