Crafting efficient regular expressions is somewhat of an art. In large part, it centers around controlling/minimizing backtracking and the number of steps it takes the regex engine to match or fail, but the fact that most engines implement different sets of internal optimizations (which can either make certain operations faster, or avoid work by performing [...]

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When generating an HTML content teaser or summary, many people just strip all tags before grabbing the leftmost n characters. Recently on ColdFusion developer Ben Nadel's blog, he tackled the problem of closing XHTML tags in a truncated string using ColdFusion and it's underlying Java methods. After seeing this, I created a roughly equivalent JavaScript [...]

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