The Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is used for the distribution, inquiry, retrieval, and posting of news articles using a reliable stream-based transmission¹. Regular expressions (regex) are often used in NNTP for various purposes such as validating message IDs, extracting headers, and parsing commands.

Common NNTP Regex Patterns

Message-ID Validation

A message ID in NNTP is a unique identifier for each article. It is typically enclosed in angle brackets. A regex pattern to validate a message ID might look like this:

This pattern matches any string that starts with <, followed by one or more characters that are not >, and ends with >.

Header Extraction

NNTP articles contain headers that provide metadata about the article. A common task is to extract these headers. A regex pattern to match a header line might look like this:

This pattern matches any line that starts with one or more letters or hyphens, followed by a colon, a space, and one or more characters.