RFC: file formatting change
As this list has grown and matured the quality of coverage has grown. to curate the list comments have become more frequent, such as 0.0.0.0 adelogs.adobe.com #See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/07/adobe_digital_editions_4_caught_snooping_into_ebook_collections_of_users/
or 0.0.0.0 static.smni.com # Santa Monica - popunders this is really useful at a glance, however it makes using the list as a data source for conversion to larger scale functions, eg: dns servers, in my specific usecase bind for RPZ zones quite trouble some as the bind (common in all dns servers though ) format of
"IP" "ZONE "RECORD TYPE"
ends up with
"IP" "ZONE" "COMMENT-RECORDTYPE MERGED"
for example
0.0.0.0 adelogs.adobe.com #See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/07/adobe_digital_editions_4_caught_snooping_into_ebook_collections_of_users/ CNAME .
This is possible to overcome but it does require more complex regex than is needed if a file format change was applied where the comments where placed above the offending line - it would be easy to filter content from comment
eg: #See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/07/adobe_digital_editions_4_caught_snooping_into_ebook_collections_of_users/ 0.0.0.0 adelogs.adobe.com
that way filtering anything that didn't start with 0.0.0.0 as valid content is simple, comments are still possible and applications that honour # as a comment are not impacted.
Source: StevenBlack/hosts