Explain Like I'm Five

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Simplifying Complexity, One Answer at a Time!

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ELI5: How are these massive adblock lists kept updated so regularly? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Do they get some kind of real-time feed that tells them "hey this URL popped up in the web today, but it is a tracker, so block it", or is this exercise is mostly helped by the crowd ?

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[–] [email protected] 75 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Regular expression magic.

A lot of ad networks have a pattern to the name or the window the advert appears in.

Using regular expression you can find just the adwindow and ignore the actual content.

Now what is regular expression? A wizard language.
ask any programmer about RE after 4 beers and watch the hate wash over their face.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I love regex, I'm not even gonna lie. To be fair, my expressions haven't been 50+ characters long, but still.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I used to play regex games online lol. I once wrote a pattern for work that was ~200 characters. I loved doing it lol.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Seems like an interesting way to learn. Do you remember any of them?

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