Extension:AbuseFilter/Rules format

The rules are formatted much as conditionals in a C/Java/Perl-like language.

Literals
You can specify a literal by placing it in single or double quotes (for strings), or by typing it in as-is (for numbers, both floating-point and integer). You can get linebreaks with, tab characters with  , and you can also escape the quote character with a backslash.

Examples

Comments
You can specify comments using the following syntax: /* This is a comment */

Variables
The abuse filter passes various variables by name into the parser. These variables can be accessed by typing their name in, in a place where a literal would work. You can view the variables associated with each request in the abuse log.

You can define more variables for ease of understanding with the assign symbol  in a line (closed by  ) within a condition. Example (from w:en:Special:AbuseFilter/79):

Lists:

All variables
CentralAuth also provides a global_user_groups variable, like user_groups.

Page/Article namespace
See also Manual:Namespace

Simple comparisons
You can compare variables with other variables and literals with the following syntax:
 * and &mdash;Return true if the left-hand operand is less than/greater than the right-hand operand respectively.
 * and &mdash;Return true if the left-hand operand is less than or equal to/greater than or equal to the right-hand operand respectively.
 * (or ) and  &mdash;Return true if the left-hand operand is equal to/not equal to the right-hand operand respectively.
 * and &mdash;Return true if the left-hand operand is equal to/not equal to the right-hand operand AND the left-hand operand is the same/not the same data type to the right-hand operand respectively.

Arithmetic
You can use basic arithmetic symbols to do arithmetic on variables and literals with the following syntax:
 * — Subtract the right-hand operand from the left-hand operand.
 * — Add the right-hand operand to the left-hand operand.
 * — Multiply the left-hand operand by the right-hand operand.
 * — Divide the left-hand operand by the right-hand operand.
 * — Raise the left-hand operand to the exponential power specified by the right-hand operand.
 * — Return the remainder given when the left-hand operand is divided by the right-hand operand.

String concatenation
You can use the  (plus) symbol to concatenate two literal strings or the values of two vars with a string value.

Keywords
The following special keywords are included for often-used functionality:
 * (or ) returns true if the left-hand operand matches the glob pattern in the right-hand operand.
 * returns true if the right-hand operand (a string) contains the left-hand operand.
 * (or ) and   return true if the left-hand operand matches (contains) the regex pattern in the right-hand operand (  is case insensitive). The system uses PCRE. The only PCRE option enabled is   (modifier   [//php.net/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.modifiers.php in PHP]); for   both   and   are enabled (modifier  ).
 * ,  and
 * ,  and
 * ,  and
 * ,  and

Examples

Functions
A number of built-in functions are included to ease some common issues. They are executed in the general format, and can be used in place of any literal or variable. Its arguments can be given as literals, variables, or even other functions.

Other
 * returns the second argument converted to variant language specified by the first argument. ONLY apply on wikis with LanguageConverter class. (New func added on 49399, need support of MediaWiki after 49397)

Boolean operations
You can match if and only if all of a number of conditions are true, one of a number of conditions are true, or one and only one of all conditions are true.
 * &mdash; OR – returns true if one or more of the conditions is true.
 * &mdash; AND – returns true if both of the conditions are true.
 * &mdash; XOR – returns true if one, and only one of the two conditions is true.
 * &mdash; NOT – returns true if the condition is not true.

Examples

Order of operations
Operations are generally done left-to-right, but there is an order to which they are resolved. As soon as the filter fails one of the conditions, it will stop checking the rest of them (due to short-circuit evaluation) and move on to the next filter (except for T43693). The evaluation order is:
 * 1) Anything surrounded by parentheses (  and  ) is evaluated as a single unit.
 * 2) Turning variables/literals into their respective data. (i.e.,   to 0)
 * 3) Function calls (,  , etc.)
 * 4) Unary   and   (defining positive or negative value, e.g. ,  )
 * 5) Keywords
 * 6) Boolean inversion
 * 7) Exponentiation
 * 8) Multiplication-related (multiplication, division, modulo)
 * 9) Addition and subtraction
 * 10) Comparisons.
 * 11) Boolean operations.

Examples

 * is equivalent to, not to  . In particular, both   and   evaluates to.
 * is equivalent to, not to  . In particular, both   and   evaluates to.

Condition counting
The condition limit is (more or less) tracking the number of comparison operators + number of function calls entered.

Further explanation on how to reduce conditions used can be found at Extension:AbuseFilter/Conditions.

Useful links

 * PCRE pattern syntax.
 * meta:Edit filters benefiting to various local Wikiprojects