about SSF

What the hell is this?: It's a web toy which will let you search for a regular expression in the text log I keep of my dreams, reporting the number of lines on which it occurs. An individual dream is generally confined to a single line in the log, so this is a (mostly) accurate count of dreams containing your regexp.
What's a regular expression?: A regular expression is a way to describe a sequence of characters. For more help on how Perl (which is what SSF uses) deals with regular expressions, take a look at the perlre documentation. If your regular expressions have been resulting in errors, please look there. As a quick start, you should know that "." matches any single character, ".*" matches any number (including 0) of any characters, and ".+" matches any nonzero number of any characters. "*" by itself is *not* a wildcard; use ".*".
You keep log of your dreams?: Yes. However, the uploaded log only dates back to May 2000, and I'm not always good about uploading it regularly.
When did you last upload it, anyway?: It will tell you on the front page and on the answer page.
Why did you make this?: As an exercise in hubris and Perl.
Why "be careful"?: Because the asker always reveals something of themselves by asking a question.
".*" alone returns something huge. Do you really remember that much?: You're including empty lines. Try ".+" instead.
"[Ff]ire" returns 0. Is it broken?: No, but nice of you to ask.
Why do you call it SSF?: It's an allusion to a song. (I don't want hits to this page from hapless people searching for the song or group, so if you want to know, email me.)

up	-	the room around you
home	-	the front door
mailbox	-	tell me things

content last modified Sat Sep 22 16:48:08 CDT 2001 by braun.