Regex is not blocking domains

[Blocksmith]

I am running Pi hole on a local device and I have updated another device to use it as its DNS from which I try to access YouTube videos which involves contacting the domains I wish to block [**]. I am solely using the admin web interface to modify the blacklist. I am adding the following to the list:

^r*[0-9]\{1,99\}-*sn-*[a-z0-9]\{1,99\}-[a-z0-9]\{1,99\}\.googlevideo\.com$

note I also tried:

^r*[0-9]{1,99}-*sn-*[a-z0-9]{1,99}-[a-z0-9]{1,99}\.googlevideo\.com$

but the latter did not work with 'grep -e' so I figured Pi-hole might need the braces escaped as well.

Upon adding the above regular expressions I do not observe a difference in the filtering. The domains listed below are not blocked and are fed to my upstream DNS.

Am I missing a step after updating the blacklist? I have restarted the DNS server to no avail. I believe the regular expression(s) above are supported by Pi-hole but neither produce the desired result.

Any suggestions?

Expected Behaviour:

I expect the domains:

rr1---sn-u2bpouxgoxu-ntqz.googlevideo.com
rr2---sn-u2bpouxgoxu-ntqz.googlevideo.com
rr6---sn-u2bpouxgoxu-ntqk.googlevideo.com

(among many others) to be blocked.

Actual Behaviour:

These domains are not blocked and are handled by the upstream DNS.

[**] I understand attempting to block YouTube ads using Pi-hole is fraught with issues. This post is not about that. This post is concerned with the blacklist not operating as expected.

[jfb]

Test your regex here: https://regex101.com

[Blocksmith]

A rather pointless reply since it is known (has been posted on this forum) that https://regex101.com accepts more regular expressions than the Pi-hole implementation, but of course I used that website initially. Secondly, you could have simply checked my regex against that website yourself to establish if your suggestion was going to be of any use to me.

[jfb]

@Blocksmith

of course I used that website initially

That would have been good info to include in your post.

@Blocksmith

you could have simply checked my regex against that website yourself

No.

I assume you have read our regex documentation as well?

https://docs.pi-hole.net/regex/tutorial/

https://docs.pi-hole.net/regex/testmode/

Best of luck to you resolving this.

[yubiuser]

Use the embedded regex-tester to validate your regex

pihole-FTL regex-test rr1---sn-u2bpouxgoxu-ntqz.googlevideo.com "^r*[0-9]{1,99}-*sn-*[a-z0-9]{1,99}-[a-z0-9]{1,99}\.googlevideo\.com$"
[i] Compiling regex filter...
    Compiled regex filter in 33.373 msec

Checking domain...
    ^r*[0-9]{1,99}-*sn-*[a-z0-9]{1,99}-[a-z0-9]{1,99}\.googlevideo\.com$ matches
   Time: 0.228 msec

[Redback]

Is there any possibility that you guys could create a GUI within the Pi-Hole browser to use this feature "regex-test", as it would help users greatly. Since most user would have to remotely log in to a remote site like Raspberry Pi just to use this feature.

P.S Never knew this feature "regex-test" existed, but I use another method to proof check regex.

[yubiuser]

@Redback

Is there any possibility that you guys could create a GUI within the Pi-Hole browser to use this feature "regex-test", as it would help users greatly.

Please write a feature request here

Feature Requests