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I am trying to figure out a way to determine if my matched comma(,) does not lie inside a regex. Basically, i do not want to match my character if it lies in a regex.
The regex i have come up with is ,(?<!.+\/)(?!.+\/) but its not quite working.
Any ideas?
I want to skip /some,regex/ but match any other commas.
Edit:
Live example: http://rubular.com/r/WjrwSnmzyP
Here is the regex that will work for you:
,(?!\s)(?=(?:(?:[^/]*\/){2})*[^/]*$)
Live Demo: http://rubular.com/r/37buDdg1tW
Explanation: It means match comma followed by EVEN number of forward slash /. Hence comma (,) between 2 slash (/) characters will NOT be matched and outside ones will be matched (since those are followed by even number of / characters).
A curious thing about regular expressions is that if you want to use them to ignore "something" that is within "something else", you need to match that "something else", prefer matches of it, and then either silently discard or reproduce those matches.
For example, in order to remove all commas from a string unless they are in a regular expression literal—
In Perl:
my $s = "/foo,bar/,baz";
$s =~ s{(/(?:[^/\\]|\\.)+/)|,}{\1}g;
In ECMAScript:
var s = "/foo,bar/,baz";
s = s.replace(/(\/([^\/\\]|\\.)+\/)|,/g, "$1");
or
s = s.replace(new RegExp("(/([^/\\\\]|\\\\.)+/)|,", "g"), "$1");
Note that I am capturing the match for the regular expression literal in the string value, and reproducing it (\1 or $1) if it matched. (If the other part of the alternation – the standalone comma – matched, the empty string is captured, so this simple approach suffices here.)
For further reading I recommend “Mastering Regular Expressions” by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl. Two rather enlightening example chapters, each from a different edition, are available for free online.
Thanks for the previous assistance everyone!. I have a query regarding RegExp in Perl
My issue is..
I know, when matching you can write m// or // or ## (must include m or s if you use this). What is causing me the confusion is a book example on escaping characters I have. I believe most people escape lots of characters, as a sure fire way of the program working without missing a metacharacter something ie: \# when looking to match # say in an email address.
Here's my issue and I know what this script does:
$date= "15/12/99"
$date=~ s#(\d+)/(\d+)/(\d+)#$1/$2/$3#; << why are no forward slashes escaped??
print($date);
Yet the later example I have, shows it rewritten, as (which i also understand and they're escaped)
$date =~ s/()(\d+)\/(\d+)\/(d+)/$2\/$1\/$3; <<<<which is escaping the forward slashes.
I know the slashes or hashes are programmer preference and their use. What I don't understand is why the second example, escapes the slashes, yet the first doesn't - I have tried and they work both ways. No escaping slashes with hashes? What's even MORE confusing is, looking at yet another book example I also have earlier to this one, using hashes again, they too escape the # symbol.
if ($address =~ m#\##) { print("That's an email address"); } or something similar
So what do you escape from what you don't using hashes or slashes? I know you have to escape metacharacters to match them but I'm confused.
When you build a regexp, you define a character as a delimiter for your regexp i.e. doing // or ##.
If you need to use that character inside your regexp, you will need to escape it so that the regexp engine does not see it as the end of the regexp.
If you build your regexp between forward slashes /, you will need to escape the forward slashes contained in your regexp, hence the escaping in your second example.
Of course, the same rule apply with any character you use as a regexp delimiter, not just forward slashes.
The forward slashes are not meta characters in themselves - only the use of them in the second example as expression separators makes them "special".
The format of a substitute expression is:
s<expression separator char><expression to look for><expression separator char><expression to replace with><expression separator char>
In the first example, using a hash as the first character after the =~ s, makes that character the expression separator, so forward slash is not special and does not require any escaping.
in the second example, the expression separator is indeed the forward slash, so it must be escaped within the expressions themselves.
The regex match-operator allows to define a custom non-whitespace-character as seperator.
In your first example the '#' is used as seperator. So in this regex you don't need to escape the '/' because it hase no special meaning. In the second regex, the seperator char isn't changed. So the default '/' is used. Now you have to escape all '/' in your pattern. Otherwise the parser is confused. :)
If you are not use slashes, the recommend practice is to use the curly braces and the /x modifier.
$date=~ s{ (\d+) \/ (\d+) \/ (\d+) }{$1/$2/$3}x;
Escaping the non-alphanumerics is also a standard even if they are not meta-characters. See perldoc -f quotemeta.
There is another depth to this question about escaping forward slashes with the s operator.
With my example the capturing becomes the problem.
$image_name =~ s/((http:\/\/.+\/)\/)/$2/g;
For this to work the typo with the addition of a second forward slash, had to be captured.
Also, trying to work with just the two slashes did not work. The first slash has to be led by more than one character.
Changing "http://world.com/Photos//space_shots/out_of_this_world.jpg"
To: "http://world.com/Photos/space_shots/out_of_this_world.jpg"
I need to search for lines in a CSV file that end in an unterminated, double-quoted string.
For example:
1,2,a,b,"dog","rabbit
would match whereas
1,2,a,b,"dog","rabbit","cat bird"
1,2,a,b,"dog",rabbit
would not.
I have very limited experience with regular expressions, and the only thing I could think of is something like
"[^"]*$
However, that matches the last quote to the end of the line.
How would this be done?
Assuming quotes can't be escaped, you need to test the parity of quotes (making sure that there's an even number of them instead of odd). Regular expressions are great for that:
^(([^"]*"){2})*[^"]*$
That will match all lines with an even number of quotes. You can invert the result for all strings with an odd number. Or you can just add another ([^"]*") part at the beginning:
^[^"]*"(([^"]*"){2})*[^"]*$
Similarly, if you have access to reluctant operators instead of greedy ones you can use a simpler-looking expression:
^((.*"){2})*.*$ #even
^.*"((.*"){2})*.*$ #odd
Now, if quotes can be escaped, it's a different question entirely, but the approach would be similar: determine the parity of unescaped quotes.
Assuming that the strings cannot contain ", you need to match a string that has an odd number of quotes, like this:
([^"]*("[^"]*")?)*"
Note that this is vulnerable to a DDOS attack.
This will match zero or more sets of unquoted run, followed by quoted strings.
Try this one:
".+[^"](,|$)
This matches a quote (anywhere in the line), followed (greedily) by anything but another quote before the end of the line or a comma.
The net affect is that it will only match lines with dangling quoted strings.
I think it's even immune to 'nested expandos attacks' (we do live in a very dangerous world ...)
To avoid "nested expandos":
egrep -v '^[^"]*("[^"]*"[^"]*)*[^"]*$' my_file
I have a line like below.
fullname = (this is a test name);
I want to double quote all the strings inside "(" and ")".
i.e fullname = ("this" "is" "a" "test" "name");
Can someone give me a vim regex to do that?
I would do this as follows:
:s/\<\w\+\>/"&"/gc
Due to the confirmation switch 'c' you will be asked for each replacement.
Answer 'n' (no) for the replacement of 'fullname' and 'a' (all) for the rest of the line.
This does it:
:%s/\v(\(.*)#<=[[:alnum:]]+(.*\))#=/"&"/g
Be aware that matching nested patterns (such in parentheses) with regex will go wrong if the input is malformed. The above does not handle nested parentheses at all, and quoted or escaped parentheses will also break it. Handle with care.
It reads as follows:
:%s substitute on all lines
/ matching
\v (with "very magic" switched on)
(\(.*)#<= a position that follows an opening paren, on this line
[[:alnum:]]+ a series of alphanumeric characters (i.e. "words")
(.*\))#= that are followed by a closing paren, on this line
/ replace with
"&" the match, in quotes
/g globally
It is a notable fact that vim does actually support variable length look-behind. Most modern regex implementations do not.
This command puts everything which is not space, tab, equals sign, paren or semicolon to quotes:
:s/[^ \t=();][^ \t=();]*/"&"/g
Please note that this quotes fullname as well, but you can remove those quotes manually.
Sometimes it is worth doing part of the work manually, because automating it would be slower.
Run the command:
:help substi
to to get help about regexp substitution in vim.
I have a value like this:
"Foo Bar" "Another Value" something else
What regex will return the values enclosed in the quotation marks (e.g. Foo Bar and Another Value)?
In general, the following regular expression fragment is what you are looking for:
"(.*?)"
This uses the non-greedy *? operator to capture everything up to but not including the next double quote. Then, you use a language-specific mechanism to extract the matched text.
In Python, you could do:
>>> import re
>>> string = '"Foo Bar" "Another Value"'
>>> print re.findall(r'"(.*?)"', string)
['Foo Bar', 'Another Value']
I've been using the following with great success:
(["'])(?:(?=(\\?))\2.)*?\1
It supports nested quotes as well.
For those who want a deeper explanation of how this works, here's an explanation from user ephemient:
([""']) match a quote; ((?=(\\?))\2.) if backslash exists, gobble it, and whether or not that happens, match a character; *? match many times (non-greedily, as to not eat the closing quote); \1 match the same quote that was use for opening.
I would go for:
"([^"]*)"
The [^"] is regex for any character except '"'
The reason I use this over the non greedy many operator is that I have to keep looking that up just to make sure I get it correct.
Lets see two efficient ways that deal with escaped quotes. These patterns are not designed to be concise nor aesthetic, but to be efficient.
These ways use the first character discrimination to quickly find quotes in the string without the cost of an alternation. (The idea is to discard quickly characters that are not quotes without to test the two branches of the alternation.)
Content between quotes is described with an unrolled loop (instead of a repeated alternation) to be more efficient too: [^"\\]*(?:\\.[^"\\]*)*
Obviously to deal with strings that haven't balanced quotes, you can use possessive quantifiers instead: [^"\\]*+(?:\\.[^"\\]*)*+ or a workaround to emulate them, to prevent too much backtracking. You can choose too that a quoted part can be an opening quote until the next (non-escaped) quote or the end of the string. In this case there is no need to use possessive quantifiers, you only need to make the last quote optional.
Notice: sometimes quotes are not escaped with a backslash but by repeating the quote. In this case the content subpattern looks like this: [^"]*(?:""[^"]*)*
The patterns avoid the use of a capture group and a backreference (I mean something like (["']).....\1) and use a simple alternation but with ["'] at the beginning, in factor.
Perl like:
["'](?:(?<=")[^"\\]*(?s:\\.[^"\\]*)*"|(?<=')[^'\\]*(?s:\\.[^'\\]*)*')
(note that (?s:...) is a syntactic sugar to switch on the dotall/singleline mode inside the non-capturing group. If this syntax is not supported you can easily switch this mode on for all the pattern or replace the dot with [\s\S])
(The way this pattern is written is totally "hand-driven" and doesn't take account of eventual engine internal optimizations)
ECMA script:
(?=["'])(?:"[^"\\]*(?:\\[\s\S][^"\\]*)*"|'[^'\\]*(?:\\[\s\S][^'\\]*)*')
POSIX extended:
"[^"\\]*(\\(.|\n)[^"\\]*)*"|'[^'\\]*(\\(.|\n)[^'\\]*)*'
or simply:
"([^"\\]|\\.|\\\n)*"|'([^'\\]|\\.|\\\n)*'
Peculiarly, none of these answers produce a regex where the returned match is the text inside the quotes, which is what is asked for. MA-Madden tries but only gets the inside match as a captured group rather than the whole match. One way to actually do it would be :
(?<=(["']\b))(?:(?=(\\?))\2.)*?(?=\1)
Examples for this can be seen in this demo https://regex101.com/r/Hbj8aP/1
The key here is the the positive lookbehind at the start (the ?<= ) and the positive lookahead at the end (the ?=). The lookbehind is looking behind the current character to check for a quote, if found then start from there and then the lookahead is checking the character ahead for a quote and if found stop on that character. The lookbehind group (the ["']) is wrapped in brackets to create a group for whichever quote was found at the start, this is then used at the end lookahead (?=\1) to make sure it only stops when it finds the corresponding quote.
The only other complication is that because the lookahead doesn't actually consume the end quote, it will be found again by the starting lookbehind which causes text between ending and starting quotes on the same line to be matched. Putting a word boundary on the opening quote (["']\b) helps with this, though ideally I'd like to move past the lookahead but I don't think that is possible. The bit allowing escaped characters in the middle I've taken directly from Adam's answer.
The RegEx of accepted answer returns the values including their sourrounding quotation marks: "Foo Bar" and "Another Value" as matches.
Here are RegEx which return only the values between quotation marks (as the questioner was asking for):
Double quotes only (use value of capture group #1):
"(.*?[^\\])"
Single quotes only (use value of capture group #1):
'(.*?[^\\])'
Both (use value of capture group #2):
(["'])(.*?[^\\])\1
-
All support escaped and nested quotes.
I liked Eugen Mihailescu's solution to match the content between quotes whilst allowing to escape quotes. However, I discovered some problems with escaping and came up with the following regex to fix them:
(['"])(?:(?!\1|\\).|\\.)*\1
It does the trick and is still pretty simple and easy to maintain.
Demo (with some more test-cases; feel free to use it and expand on it).
PS: If you just want the content between quotes in the full match ($0), and are not afraid of the performance penalty use:
(?<=(['"])\b)(?:(?!\1|\\).|\\.)*(?=\1)
Unfortunately, without the quotes as anchors, I had to add a boundary \b which does not play well with spaces and non-word boundary characters after the starting quote.
Alternatively, modify the initial version by simply adding a group and extract the string form $2:
(['"])((?:(?!\1|\\).|\\.)*)\1
PPS: If your focus is solely on efficiency, go with Casimir et Hippolyte's solution; it's a good one.
A very late answer, but like to answer
(\"[\w\s]+\")
http://regex101.com/r/cB0kB8/1
The pattern (["'])(?:(?=(\\?))\2.)*?\1 above does the job but I am concerned of its performances (it's not bad but could be better). Mine below it's ~20% faster.
The pattern "(.*?)" is just incomplete. My advice for everyone reading this is just DON'T USE IT!!!
For instance it cannot capture many strings (if needed I can provide an exhaustive test-case) like the one below:
$string = 'How are you? I\'m fine, thank you';
The rest of them are just as "good" as the one above.
If you really care both about performance and precision then start with the one below:
/(['"])((\\\1|.)*?)\1/gm
In my tests it covered every string I met but if you find something that doesn't work I would gladly update it for you.
Check my pattern in an online regex tester.
This version
accounts for escaped quotes
controls backtracking
/(["'])((?:(?!\1)[^\\]|(?:\\\\)*\\[^\\])*)\1/
MORE ANSWERS! Here is the solution i used
\"([^\"]*?icon[^\"]*?)\"
TLDR;
replace the word icon with what your looking for in said quotes and voila!
The way this works is it looks for the keyword and doesn't care what else in between the quotes.
EG:
id="fb-icon"
id="icon-close"
id="large-icon-close"
the regex looks for a quote mark "
then it looks for any possible group of letters thats not "
until it finds icon
and any possible group of letters that is not "
it then looks for a closing "
I liked Axeman's more expansive version, but had some trouble with it (it didn't match for example
foo "string \\ string" bar
or
foo "string1" bar "string2"
correctly, so I tried to fix it:
# opening quote
(["'])
(
# repeat (non-greedy, so we don't span multiple strings)
(?:
# anything, except not the opening quote, and not
# a backslash, which are handled separately.
(?!\1)[^\\]
|
# consume any double backslash (unnecessary?)
(?:\\\\)*
|
# Allow backslash to escape characters
\\.
)*?
)
# same character as opening quote
\1
string = "\" foo bar\" \"loloo\""
print re.findall(r'"(.*?)"',string)
just try this out , works like a charm !!!
\ indicates skip character
My solution to this is below
(["']).*\1(?![^\s])
Demo link : https://regex101.com/r/jlhQhV/1
Explanation:
(["'])-> Matches to either ' or " and store it in the backreference \1 once the match found
.* -> Greedy approach to continue matching everything zero or more times until it encounters ' or " at end of the string. After encountering such state, regex engine backtrack to previous matching character and here regex is over and will move to next regex.
\1 -> Matches to the character or string that have been matched earlier with the first capture group.
(?![^\s]) -> Negative lookahead to ensure there should not any non space character after the previous match
Unlike Adam's answer, I have a simple but worked one:
(["'])(?:\\\1|.)*?\1
And just add parenthesis if you want to get content in quotes like this:
(["'])((?:\\\1|.)*?)\1
Then $1 matches quote char and $2 matches content string.
All the answer above are good.... except they DOES NOT support all the unicode characters! at ECMA Script (Javascript)
If you are a Node users, you might want the the modified version of accepted answer that support all unicode characters :
/(?<=((?<=[\s,.:;"']|^)["']))(?:(?=(\\?))\2.)*?(?=\1)/gmu
Try here.
echo 'junk "Foo Bar" not empty one "" this "but this" and this neither' | sed 's/[^\"]*\"\([^\"]*\)\"[^\"]*/>\1</g'
This will result in: >Foo Bar<><>but this<
Here I showed the result string between ><'s for clarity, also using the non-greedy version with this sed command we first throw out the junk before and after that ""'s and then replace this with the part between the ""'s and surround this by ><'s.
From Greg H. I was able to create this regex to suit my needs.
I needed to match a specific value that was qualified by being inside quotes. It must be a full match, no partial matching could should trigger a hit
e.g. "test" could not match for "test2".
reg = r"""(['"])(%s)\1"""
if re.search(reg%(needle), haystack, re.IGNORECASE):
print "winning..."
Hunter
If you're trying to find strings that only have a certain suffix, such as dot syntax, you can try this:
\"([^\"]*?[^\"]*?)\".localized
Where .localized is the suffix.
Example:
print("this is something I need to return".localized + "so is this".localized + "but this is not")
It will capture "this is something I need to return".localized and "so is this".localized but not "but this is not".
A supplementary answer for the subset of Microsoft VBA coders only one uses the library Microsoft VBScript Regular Expressions 5.5 and this gives the following code
Sub TestRegularExpression()
Dim oRE As VBScript_RegExp_55.RegExp '* Tools->References: Microsoft VBScript Regular Expressions 5.5
Set oRE = New VBScript_RegExp_55.RegExp
oRE.Pattern = """([^""]*)"""
oRE.Global = True
Dim sTest As String
sTest = """Foo Bar"" ""Another Value"" something else"
Debug.Assert oRE.test(sTest)
Dim oMatchCol As VBScript_RegExp_55.MatchCollection
Set oMatchCol = oRE.Execute(sTest)
Debug.Assert oMatchCol.Count = 2
Dim oMatch As Match
For Each oMatch In oMatchCol
Debug.Print oMatch.SubMatches(0)
Next oMatch
End Sub