zlacker

>>todsac+(OP)
The real punchline is that this is a perfect example of "just enough knowledge to be dangerous." Whoever processed these emails knew enough to know emails aren't plain text, but not enough to know that quoted-printable decoding isn't something you hand-roll with find-and-replace. It's the same class of bug as manually parsing HTML with regex, it works right up until it doesn't, and then you get congressional evidence full of mystery equals signs.

>>ruhith+Vh
> It's the same class of bug as manually parsing HTML with regex, it works right up until it doesn't

I'm sure you already know this one, but for anyone else reading this I can share my favourite StackOverflow answer of all time: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454

>>lvncel+Ko
I prefer the question about CPU pipelines that gets explained using a railroad switch as example. That one does a decent job of answering the question instead of going of on a, how to best put it, mentally deranged one page rant about regexes with the lazy throw away line at the end being the only thing that makes it qualify as an answer at all.

>>josefx+br
The regex answer is from the very old days of Stackoverflow, before fun was banned. I agree it barely qualifies as answer, but considering that the question has over 4 million page views (which almost puts it in the top 100 most viewed questions all-time), it has reached a lot people. The answer probably had much more influence than any serious answer on that topic. So I'd say the author did a good job.

>>kapep+Tu
People have shared it here and on reddit a bunch of times because it's funny. I always found the pragmatic counter-answer about using regex and the comments about how brittle it is to parse XML properly assuming a specific structure to be much more useful.

>>Dangit+4F
How is it more useful? Even if you insist on using regex, you'd primarily use it to fix the HTML so that it can be parsed, not to use regex itself to parse HTML.