URL Filter

[tamer]

Hello everybody

what is the different between regular expressions & wildcard when configured URL filtering ?

thanks 

thanks

[Christopher_McMullan]

A wildcard will match any characters in the place of the wildcard character. For instance,

*.google.com would match mail.google.com, idontlikeyahoo.google.com, etc.

It would not match google.com, since the leading '.' needs to be present.

Going further, *.google.* would match the above, and using any top-level domain.

Regular expressions allow you to specify the exact range of acceptable characters or strings that need to be present for a match to occur.

A good example (non-URL, but it proves the concept) is credit card or SSN numbers. Stack Exchange is a great place to look for general syntax rules, as well as examples for the major cards and the SSN numbering regime. Take SSNs:

^(?!(000|666|9))\d{3}-(?!00)\d{2}-(?!0000)\d{4}$

This is taken from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4087468/ssn-regex-for-123-45-6789-or-xxx-xx-xxxx, and was valid up to 2010.