CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptregexsafaribacktracking
ViBoNaCci
ViBoNaCci

Reputation: 490

Regex fails only on Safari

I have the following simple email validation regex: /(.+){2,}@(.+){2,}\.(.+){2,}/

This works fine on Firefox, Chrome etc, but fails on Safari.

Why would this perfectly valid regex fail on Safari? I could not find elements in the regex that are not supported by Safari.

/(.+){2,}@(.+){2,}\.(.+){2,}/.test('[email protected]');

Above fails on Safari, but not on any other browser.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 780

Answers (1)

Wiktor Stribiżew
Wiktor Stribiżew

Reputation: 627488

Different regex engines have different tolerance to catastrophic backtracking prone patterns.

Yours is a catastrophic backtracking prone pattern as you quantify (.+) with the {2,} quantifier that makes (.+) match two or more times (that is, match one or more times twice or more, which makes it fail very slowly with non-matching patterns.)

If you meant to match any two or more chars, quantify the . pattern and not a .+ one:

/.{2,}@.{2,}\..{2,}/

Or, use existing email validation patterns..

Upvotes: 2

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