Tag: schwag

Regex Day Contest

A few months ago Ben Nadel (a regex fan and prominent ColdFusion blogger) asked me if I was interested in promoting his idea for a "National Regular Expression Day," where he'd give away some shirts and books and basically just have some fun with regex evangelism. Well, Ben finally kicked if off, assigning the honor to June 1st, 2008. Make sure to check out his blog post, because by simply posting a comment noting your preferred item from his list before June 2nd, you're entered to win it.

I'm all for regex evangelism, so I figured I'd get in on the action with my own regex contest where you can win the best commercial regex products I know of, worth up to $150! The rules are a little different here though. For one thing, you've got more time to enter — I'll keep this open until the end of Friday, June 13. Second, this isn't a lottery. The rules are still pretty simple, though.

  • Write (or link to) some kind of creative regex content in a comment on this blog post.
  • It has to be something new, specifically for this contest.
  • Enter by unlucky Friday, June 13.
  • When submitting your entry, make sure to include an email address where I can reach you in the email field (it won't be visible to others, and I'll only use it to contact you about this contest).
  • You can submit multiple entries, but each will be judged on its own and one person cannot win more than one award.
  • I get to be the judge and jury.

As for what kind of content is eligible, well, pretty much anything as long as it's regex related. You can write a regex joke (preferably not ending with the punchline "now they have two problems"), post a regex article somewhere, create a regex comic strip, share your favorite regex you've written, design a regex superhero, create a regex game, tell a story about how regexes saved the day, link to a blog post you've written about Regular Expression Day, or whatever you can come up with. Go nuts.

Here's what the winners can choose from. If you win first or second place but none of the prizes in that tier interest you, you can pick two items from a lower level.

Good luck, and I hope you have fun with this. smile (Once again, make sure to check out Ben's post that started this.)

/(bb|[^b]{2})/

/(bb|[^b]{2})/

…That is the question. ThinkGeek is selling that on a t-shirt for the "regular expression junkie + lover of literature." Wearing that around would be a sure way to get me to notice you, especially if you have a nice rack or happen to be Angelina Jolie.

Note that the parentheses are unnecessary except in the case of Perl-folk wishing to avoid using the naughty $& variable for performance reasons. Also, the expression is buggy in that many alternatives to "bb" are not matched, so it would probably be better written as simply /bb|.*/s. For a JavaScript solution you could try var answer = /^bb$/.test(i);.

Alright, I'm done debugging the shirt now.