BBbbor·Aug 27, 2025
Totally agree -- those are two incredibly useful features of regex[1][2] that are often effectively irreplaceable. I could see this being a straightforward tradeoff for applications that know for sure they don't need complex regexes but still must accept patterns written by the client for some reason(?), but otherwise this seems like a hell of a way to go to replace a `timeout` wrapper.
This paragraph in particular seems very wholesome, but misguided in light of the tradeoff:
Having a library or project that is immune to these vulnerabilities would save this effort for each project that adopted it, and would save the whole package ecosystem that effort if widely adopted.
Honestly, the biggest shock here for me is that Rust doesn't support these. Sure, Python has yet to integrate the actually-functional `regex`[3] into stdlib to replace
Read the rest
the dreadfully under-specced `re`, but Rust is the new kid on the block! I guess people just aren't writing complex regexes anymore...[4]
RE:simpler wrapper, I personally don't see any reason it wouldn't work, and dropping a whole language seems like a big win if it does. I happened to have some scaffolding on hand for the cursed, dark art of metaregexes, so AFAICT, this pattern would work for a blanket ban: https://regexr.com/8gplg Ironically, I don't think there's a way to A) prevent false-positives on triple-backslashes without using lookarounds, or B) highlight the offending groups in full without backrefs!
[1] https://www.regular-expressions.info/backref.html
[2] https://www.regular-expressions.info/lookaround.html
[3] https://github.com/mrabarnett/mrab-regex
[4] We need a regex renaissance IMO, though the feasibility of "just throw a small fine-tuned LLM at it" may delay/obviate that for users that can afford the compute... It's one of the OG AI concepts, back before intuition seemed possible!