Invalid patterns of exclusions

Certain patterns of exclusions cannot be handled and are automatically removed.

If you add invalid patterns, you will see the following admin notice:

WP Rocket: The following pattern is invalid and has been removed.

This is because the exclusion fields are looking for a Regular Expression (regex) pattern. When that includes characters that have a special meaning, it can cause problems with the regex and will generate a warning in the website's error log.

The following are the special characters that may invalidate a pattern:

• backslash: \
• caret: ^
• dollar sign: $
• period or dot: .
• vertical bar or pipe symbol: |
• question mark: ?
• asterisk or star: *
• plus sign: +
• opening parenthesis: (
• closing parenthesis: )
• opening square bracket: [
• opening curly brace: {

If you need the Regular Expression to match literally any of the listed special characters, you should escape them by prepending them with a backslash \.

Examples

The following are examples of exclusions with special characters correctly validated:

• unmatched\)closing\)parenthesis
• my\(exclusions\]pattern

In a specific example, to match a script like the following:

<script>
		window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
		function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
		gtag('js', new Date());
		gtag('set', 'developer_id.dOGY3NW', true);

		gtag('config', 'UA-40478734-1', {
			'allow_google_signals': false,
			'link_attribution': false,
			'anonymize_ip': true,
		} );

If you choose to exclude this script from Delay JavaScript Execution and use  gtag( to do, you'll need to escape the parenthesis for the regular expression to match the script: gtag\(.

But if you want to exclude all files in the /wp-content/ directory you'll need to use (.*) without escaping, i.e. adding a backslash, the parenthesis:

/wp-content/(.*)