[Mailman-Users] Regexp for blocking addresses

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Fri, 2015-09-25 at 08:23 -0700, Mark Sapiro wrote:
> On 9/25/15 7:57 AM, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> > 
> > That's still much more aggressive than what I was trying to say. I
> > actually want to ban precisely all variants of the one address
> > 
> >     joeblow at gmail.com
> > 
> > (and about a dozen other addresses) that include embedded periods
> > anywhere and the suffix, but not other gmail addresses.  grep finds
> > them with 
> > 
> >     \.\?j\.\?o\.\?e\.\?b\.\?l\.\?o\.\?w\.\    ?+.*@gmail    \.com
> > 
> > (I might want \.* instead of \.\?) but adding
> > 
> >     ^\.\?j\.\?o\.\?e\.\?b\.\?l\.\?o\.\?w\.\    ?+.*@gmail\.com
> > 
> > to the ban list doesn't seem to block them.
> 
> 
> Because in a python RE, \? is a literal '?', not a '0 or 1 of
> repeat'.
> For grep you need the \? to give ? its special meaning. a regexp for
> egrep or grep -E will be closer to what you want for python. You want
> 
> ^\.?j\.?o\.?e\.?b\.?l\.?o\.?w xxx \+.*@gmail\.com
> 
> where I'm unsure about the ' xxx ' part because I don't understand
> what
> '\     ?' is supposed to do?

Just a formatting mistake.

> 
> Or instead of the above and to account for multiple '.' maybe
> 
> ^\.*j\.*o\.*e\.*b\.*l\.*o\.*w\.*\+.*@gmail\.com
> 
> which says zero or more dots followed by j followed by zero or more
> dots
> followed by o, etc., followed by w followed by zero or more dots
> followed by + followed by anything followed by @gmail.com.
> 
> See <
> https://docs.python.org/2/library/re.html#regular-expression-syntax>.

I think that's what my problem is. Will give it a try.

Thanks very much.

> 
-- 
Matthew Saltzman
Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu