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Terence Eden

🆕 blog! “http:, ftp:, and ... dict:?”

I went for a spelunk through an ancient codebase a few weeks ago which contained a curious regex that I just couldn't grok.

{<((https?|ftp|dict|tel):[^\'">\s]+)>}i

I'm familiar with HTTP and FTP. I worked in the mobile industry, so knew that tel:+44... could be used to launch a dialer. But DICT?!?!?! It turns out that, lurking on […]

👀 Read more: shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/09/http-

#internet

4 comments
Neil Brown

@Edent Spooky! Someone asked me about the licensing of a dictionary from/for a dict server very recently, and I hadn't heard about it before either.

And now you write about it.

What a small world...

Bruce Lawson ✅

@Edent 'nifty' doesn't mean 'groovy'; groovy is nifty with lashings of extra 'cosmic'. HTH.

Jon Wood

@Edent of course curl supports it. Is there anything you can’t use curl for?

dan 💾

@Edent Oh, interesting! Sticking a dict:// url into Safari on my Mac makes it want to open the Dictionary app.

But it falls apart after that... with your example it tries to up the ‘dict.org’ directly after the :// and gets no entries found, instead of connecting to the dict.org server :/

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