this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
331 points (97.7% liked)

Programmer Humor

32464 readers
810 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

^.?$|^(..+?)\1+$

Matches strings of any character repeated a non-prime number of times

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vbk0TwkokM

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] fysihcyst@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is brilliantly disgusting.

Literal interpretation of the regexThe regex matches either a line with a single character or a line with a sequence of two or more characters that's repeated two or more times. For some examples: the regex matches "a", "b", "abab", "ababab", "aaaa", and "bbbbbb", but does not match "aa", "bb", "aaa", "ab", "aba", or "ababa".
Hint for the special thing it matchesFor a line with a single character repeated n times, what does matching (or not matching) this regex say about the number n?

[โ€“] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

You forgot empty line. Since first part is ^.?$ it's one or zero of any character.