Re: OT: NFilter help

Doug Miller wrote:
In article <4cp8o9F17548fU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Bill Stock" <me7@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

rec.woodworking flag:XPOST xref:*:*:*

Xref: uni-berlin.de rec.woodworking:1274982

So this should not be flagged, but it is.

Yes, it should. You told it to. :-)

Thus, *:*:* means match zero or more of any character, followed by zero or
more colons, followed by zero or more colons.

*:.*:.* is probably closer to what you want: zero or more of any character,
followed by one colon, followed by zero or more of any character, followed by
one colon, followed by zero or more of any character.

An illustration of the difference between mere globs, and more powerful
regular expressions.

Globbing text, a "*" will grab anything, but using regular expressions a
"*" is a "zero or more" quantifier for the preceding symbol, which in
this case is a character (irrelevant, since you are matching zero or
more of them it'll succeed in any case).

In regex: "." is any character and like Doug says, is prolly what you
want. You could also be stricter (always better) and use \w in
combination with "+":

\w+:\w+

Or, as you /appear/ to be interested in blocking posts to xposted to
_more_than_two_ groups:

\w+:\w+:\w+

er
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