June 1st 2009 - 2nd Annual (Inter)?National Regular Expression Day!
Posted June 1, 2009 at 9:30 AM by Ben Nadel
Due to all the traveling that I've been doing lately, (Inter)?National Regular Expression Day snuck on me and I didn't have much time to prepare anything! But, it's not too late - today, June 1st 2009, is the second annual (Inter)?National Regular Expression Day and the celebration will happen!
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As you all know, regular expressions are an extremely powerful way to match patterns in strings for both search and replace actions. The Regular Expression is a great tool to have in the toolbox and one that is most definitely worth celebrating. If you have no idea what a Regular Expression is, sometimes referred to as "RegEx", I highly recommend that you look at my Introduction to Regular Expressions blog post. I think that once you start getting into them, you'll never go back to working without them.
The Contest
Prize: $100 Amazon.com Gift Certificate
This year, the contest will be in relation to regular-expression-based Twitter filtering. Twitter is a sort of public chat application in which you have to subscribe to follow people's "Tweets" (aka. status updates). The more people you follow, the more Tweets you receive. Once you start to follow a large number of people, the amount of noise that you receive via the Twitter stream makes effective communication almost impossible.
As a result, I feel that complex filtering is going to start playing a huge part in the Twittersphere. To be entered into the contest, post a comment with a regular expression that you feel would help filter out some of the junk that comes through the Twitter stream. For example:
- (breakfast|lunch|dinner)
- beer[^\w]o[^\w]clock
- listening to:
Enter your comment and regular expression filter by the end of the day tomorrow, June 2nd, 2009, and you will be placed into contestant pool from which a winner will be randomly selected.
Now go get your pattern-matching on!
Reader Comments
@[^ ]+\W\w+$
@Pete,
What are you doing here? Filtering out other people's back-and-forth conversations?
Oh jeeeez, how about International Children's Day?
P.S: damn u're still handsome!
@Serene,
Regular expressions are far more powerful than children :)
Like I said: jeeeeeeez!
@Ben - filtering out one word replies like "@bennadel thanks"
@Pete,
Ahh, gotcha. Good thinking.
To be on the comical side :)
(?i)(\.net|asp.?|microsoft|ms)
Block all requests to retweet/digg etc.
/please\s+?(RT|retweet|read|digg|stumble|fav|bookmark|upvote|comment)/i
And, to block all retweets:
/(^|\s)(RT|retweet(ing)?)\s/i
^(..)*$
matches all even tweets (in my mind, didn't test it). thus probably cuts the tweet flood in half ;)
ok if that doesn't count. this (hopefully) recognizes all "I'm listening to whatnot" tweets/blips
http://blip\.fm
[zZ]{3,}
Going to bed now... okay, so don't tweet then ;-)
The thing I like most about Twitter is finding out what the people I like are likin' (or hatin') on.
(like|cool|sucks|hate|awesome|love|great|free|naked)
Sorry, I couldn't resist throwing the "naked" in there. I don't think I've ever even seen the word come up, but you know...just in case!
Hey guys, sorry for taking FOREVER to announce the winner. Unfortunately, outside constraints were holding me back and yada yada yada it's over a month later the winner of the 2nd Annual (Inter)?National Regular Expression Day contest is:
Master of security, Pete Freitag
Congratulations Pete - I'll be in touch via email.
Wow thanks Ben, you Rock!!
