[Privoxy-users] easylist

[Steven Smith]

> I use this script every few weeks:
> 
> https://github.com/Andrwe/privoxy-blocklist/blob/master/privoxy-blocklist.sh

[Updated]

Unfortunately, there are several EasyList rules to Privoxy converters that produce neither correct nor comprehensive rules, and this repo appears to be another example. See, e.g.  https://github.com/Andrwe/privoxy-blocklist/issues/7 . Another example: https://github.com/skroll/privoxy-adblock/issues/11 .

To the best of my knowledge, adblock2privoxy is the only converter that produces correct Privoxy rules with nearly complete EasyList blocking functionality accomplished by using an auxiliary webserver with Privoxy for CSS element blocks. 

Please see the details at the forked repo https://github.com/essandess/adblock2privoxy .

The technical reason for the necessity of the webserver is that regular expressions, as a regular finite-state automata grammar, are unable to parse context-free grammars like (HT)ML. Google the Chomsky hierarchy, or better yet, read "Parsing HTML the Cthulhu Way" https://blog.codinghorror.com/parsing-html-the-cthulhu-way . Though it's possible to write regex's for element blocks that would work in many situations, Privoxy's regex filters are a very poor choice to handle CSS element blocking.

Using an nginx webserver like adblock2privoxyto handle CSS element blocks takes this (impossible) problem out of Privoxy's regex filter rules and let's the webserver handle element blocks.