catastrophic backtracking

Fetched 2026-10-26 (cache).

Datamuse reports no synonyms or antonyms for this word.

Noun

1. {{lb|en|computer science|regex}} An [[excessive]]ly large amount of [[backtracking]] that occurs with certain regular expressions, due to an [[exponential]]ly large number of possible matching [[path]]s to check.

Source: Wiktionary · CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wiktionary dump) · cached copy, not a rewrite.