[Feature request] Regex support for package exlusions

[elmaxe]

If you want to exclude packages with a common pattern, you currently have to list all packages you want to exclude. With regex support, you could specify a single regex to exclude many packages.

Example config.json

{
  "exclude": [
    "^@blabla.*"
  ]
}

[BePo65]

Sounds good; let me think a few days about the consequences.

[BePo65]

So I have a 2 questions:

• do you have a real use case and what does it look like?
• as regex is quite a costly operation: how to differentiate between simple and regex excludes (e.g. add a new configuration parameter)?

[elmaxe]

• do you have a real use case and what does it look like?

We use this package to get the list of open source packages our app uses, which is required in many licenses. We have some internal packages at my company that we don't want to show up in this list. Right now we have to add every single one of those internal packages to the list of exclusions. Since they all have a common prefix (@company/<package-name>), it would be easier to specify a regex to exclude all packages that starts with @company.

• as regex is quite a costly operation: how to differentiate between simple and regex excludes (e.g. add a new configuration parameter)?

I asked chatgpt for an example, and it suggested the following:

{
  "exclude": [
    "string_to_exclude_1",
    "string_to_exclude_2",
    ...
  ],
  "excludeRegex": [
    "regex_pattern_1",
    "regex_pattern_2",
    ...
  ]
}

but perhaps something like this would be better

{
  "exclude": {
    strings: [...],
    regex: [...]
  }
}

[BePo65]

I could imagine that the use case is quite common, so this would be a good new feature for license-report.

As a solution I would prefer the "excludeRegex" variant, as this would not break any current installations. Do you have the time to create a PR for this?

[elmaxe]

I could imagine that the use case is quite common, so this would be a good new feature for license-report.

As a solution I would prefer the "excludeRegex" variant, as this would not break any current installations. Do you have the time to create a PR for this?

Great! I will try to find some time!

[BePo65]

I had some time to play around with this feature and created a pull request (#144). Instead of an array of regular expressions, I used a single one, as this simplified the code. If more than one 'group of packages' is to be excluded this way, the regular expression must simply account for these 'groups'.

If you want, you can throw a look at the modifications before I merge the pr.

[BePo65]

solved by pr #144