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@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?
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.
-- Mark Sapiro mark@msapiro.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan