Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

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Regular Expressions make me feel like a powerful wizard - and that's not a good thing

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A confused little cardboard robot is lost amongst the daisies

(This is a rant because I'm exhausted after debugging something. If you've made RegEx your whole personality, I'm sorry.) The other day I had to fix a multi-line Regular Expression (RegEx). After a few hours of peering at it with a variety of tools, I finally understood the problem. Getting that deep into the esoteric mysteries made me feel like a powerful wizard with complete mastery of my…

When is a URL not a URL?

· 1 comment · 450 words

Summary Twitter's way of linking URLs is broken. It's annoying to users, and a pain in the arse to developers. This quick post talks about the problem and offers a solution. I've raised a bug with Twitter and I hope you'll star it as important to you. (more…) …

Bugs in Twitter Text Libraries

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The Twitter Engineering Team have a set of text processing classes which are meant to simplify and standardise the recognition of URLs, screen names, and hashtags. Dabr makes use of them to keep in conformance with Twitter's style. One of the advantages of the text processing is that it will recognise that www.example.com is a URL and automatically create a hyperlink. Considering that dropping…