When A RegEx Goes Bad – For Cisco

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Mattias Geniar, September 25, 2008

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Combine the following; a broken coffee machine, a long day at work and the sudden need to rush home, but quickly finish off one task. (but too bad, they fixed it already!)

You get a regular expression that replaces “\t” instead of “\t”, and it produces a silly website for Cisco. Notice any “T"s missing on that website?

We're missing a few "T"s here.

We're missing a few "T"s here.

Soruce-code looked like this. Every occurence of “T” was stripped.

Missing T's in Cisco Sourcode

Missing T's in Cisco Sourcode

Even the big guys occasionaly blunder!



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