"Best-effort" conversion of full-regex rules to content-blocking format #156
Description
Currently, full-regex rules are ignored when converting to content-blocking syntax because the content-blocking specification's support for regex features is much worse than what is allowed in ABP-syntax rules.
It should still be possible to convert some rules, by first verifying that the required regex featureset for each is still supported in content-blocking format. However, there will always be rules that cannot be converted.
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antonok-edm commentedon Feb 23, 2021
We'd likely want to use the regex-syntax crate for this purpose - that is what's used internally in the actual
regexcrate.antonok-edm commentedon Apr 3, 2025
Just took another look at this. May be possible in theory, but the supported regex syntax is so minimal that it's not going to have much benefit.
Out of all of the current EasyList and EasyPrivacy lists, there are a grand total of 7 regex rules (4 in EasyList, 3 in EasyList Adult) that don't use the
{...}repetition operator (which iOS cannot support).Out of those 7, 4 use
(...|...)disjunctions which iOS also cannot support.Out of the remaining 3, one uses
\d(unsupported). Another one is a$popuprule (unsupported).Which leaves a grand total of 1 rule that even has a chance of a successful conversion:
If we take the extra step of converting
\dto[0-9], then we unlock support for this additional one rule:...and that's about it.