t:validateRegExpr not guaranteed to check whole value

["M. Huber" <dj...@gmx.de>]

Hi!

I expected Tomahawk's t:validateRegExpr to always check the whole input. Today, I debugged through the tomahawk12-1.1.13 implementation of it (mainly AbstractRegExprValidator.validate()) and learned that this is not guaranteed. Please, correct me if I am wrong.

The implementation prefixes "^" and suffixes "$" obviously to force matching of the whole input. However, if the specified pattern contains alternatives like "a|b" then this makes it "^a|b$" which means: any input starting with a as well as any input ending with b.

I think either the documentation should state that the specified pattern is responsible for matching the whole pattern if this is intended. Or the implementation should be changed to something like prefixing with "^(?:" and suffixing with ")$" which would avoid the problem described above by enclosing the original pattern in a non-capturing group.

But there are different regular expression matching implementations around (like Apache ORO), probably with subtle differences; my Tomahawk implementation currently uses some Apache Commons Perl5Util (and not java.util.regex stuff, surprisingly). Therefore I am not really sure the prefix-suffix pair above works for every Tomahawk configuration. (It should work for Perl5 and java.util.regex at least, though.)

Martin


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