Didier Stevens

This new version of re-search.py introduces options –script and –execute to provide your custom Python functions.

Regular expressions can contain comments, like programming languages. This is a comment for regular expressions: (?#comment).
If you use re-search with regular expression comments, nothing special happens:
re-search.py “(?#comment)[a-z]+\.com” list.txt

However, if your regular expression comment prefixes the regular expression, and the comment starts with keyword extra=, then you can use gibberish detection, whitelist/blacklist filtering and Python function matching.

Python function matching is defined via directive P (Python). If you want to validate a string with a Python function, you use the following regular expression comment: (?#extra=P:Validate). Validate is a Python function that takes a string as argument and returns a boolean: True for a match and False if there is no match. You can provide your custom Python function(s) in a file via option –script or as a commandline argument via option –execute.

Example: Bitcoin address matching. Regular expression [13][a-km-zA-HJ-NP-Z1-9]{25,34} will match Bitcoin addresses, but also other strings that look like a Bitcoin address but are not a valid Bitcoin address. A valid Bitcoin address has a particular syntax, and a valid checksum. The regular expression can check the syntax, but not validate the checksum. Python function BTCValidate can check the checksum of a Bitcoin address. The following regular expression matches Bitcoin addresses with a valid syntax and uses Python function BTCValidate to validate the checksum:
(?#extra=P:BTCValidate)[13][a-km-zA-HJ-NP-Z1-9]{25,34}

re-search_V0_0_8.zip (https)
MD5: D4895B54268683BFBE0126D02B01A4A2
SHA256: 85919EB964FF9CF0EDE7DA64E9BCE6619480DAC71D0CB65B5EE667322B18DDBB