This question already has an answer here:
Capture a dot with postgres regexp
(1 answer)
Closed last month.
I composed almost whole question and then found answer so I will put it here in Q&A style anyway because the described behaviour seems surprising to me.
This regex works correctly and splits string to three parts - numerical part surrounded with letter parts:
select regexp_replace('abc12345def', '^(.*?)([0-9]+)(.*)$', '{first="\1" second="\2" third="\3"}');
{first="abc" second="12345" third="def"}
However after removal of ^ and $ anchors I get
select regexp_replace('abc12345def', '(.*?)([0-9]+)(.*)', '{first="\1" second="\2" third="\3"}');
{first="abc" second="1" third=""}2345def
Because the groups 2 and 3 have greedy quantifier I expect them to match 12345 and def, respectively, and hence return the same string. Equivalent Java code behaves this way:
System.out.println("abc12345def".replaceFirst("(.*?)([0-9]+)(.*)", "{first='$1' second='$2' third='$3'}"));
System.out.println("abc12345def".replaceFirst("^(.*?)([0-9]+)(.*)$", "{first='$1' second='$2' third='$3'}"));
{first='abc' second='12345' third='def'}
{first='abc' second='12345' third='def'}
Why does not it work?
fiddle
Greediness in regular expressions in Postgres is set as a whole. Essentially same example as the provided one can be found in documentation with explanation:
SELECT regexp_match('abc01234xyz', '(.*?)(\d+)(.*)');
Result: {abc,0,""}
That didn't work either, because now the RE as a whole is non-greedy and so it ends the overall match as soon as possible. We can get what we want by forcing the RE as a whole to be greedy:...
Solution is to force whole regex to be greedy:
select regexp_replace('abc12345def', '(?:(.*?)([0-9]+)(.*)){1,1}', '{first="\1" second="\2" third="\3"}');
{first="abc" second="12345" third="def"}
Slightly counterintuitive for me but works.
Related
I'm having an issue with Regex.
I'm trying to match T0000001 (2, 3 and so on).
However, some of the lines it searches has what I can describe as positioners. These are shown as a question mark, followed by 2 digits, such as ?21.
These positioners describe a new position if the document were to be printed off the website.
Example:
T123?214567
T?211234567
I need to disregard ?21 and match T1234567.
From what I can see, this is not possible.
I have looked everywhere and tried numerous attempts.
All we have to work off is the linked image. The creators cant even confirm the flavour of Regex it is - they believe its Python but I'm unsure.
Regex Image
Update
Unfortunately none of the codes below have worked so far. I thought to test each code in live (Rather than via regex thinking may work different but unfortunately still didn't work)
There is no replace feature, and as mentioned before I'm not sure if it is Python. Appreciate your help.
Do two regex operations
First do the regex replace to replace the positioners with an empty string.
(\?[0-9]{2})
Then do the regex match
T[0-9]{7}
If there's only one occurrence of the 'positioners' in each match, something like this should work: (T.*?)\?\d{2}(.*)
This can be tested here: https://regex101.com/r/XhQXkh/2
Basically, match two capture groups before and after the '?21' sequence. You'll need to concatenate these two matches.
At first, match the ?21 and repace it with a distinctive character, #, etc
\?21
Demo
and you may try this regex to find what you want
(T(?:\d{7}|[\#\d]{8}))\s
Demo,,, in which target string is captured to group 1 (or \1).
Finally, replace # with ?21 or something you like.
Python script may be like this
ss="""T123?214567
T?211234567
T1234567
T1234434?21
T5435433"""
rexpre= re.compile(r'\?21')
regx= re.compile(r'(T(?:\d{7}|[\#\d]{8}))\s')
for m in regx.findall(rexpre.sub('#',ss)):
print(m)
print()
for m in regx.findall(rexpre.sub('#',ss)):
print(re.sub('#',r'?21', m))
Output is
T123#4567
T#1234567
T1234567
T1234434#
T123?214567
T?211234567
T1234567
T1234434?21
If using a replace functionality is an option for you then this might be an approach to match T0000001 or T123?214567:
Capture a T followed by zero or more digits before the optional part in group 1 (T\d*)
Make the question mark followed by 2 digits part optional (?:\?\d{2})?
Capture one or more digits after in group 2 (\d+).
Then in the replacement you could use group1group2 \1\2.
Using word boundaries \b (Or use assertions for the start and the end of the line ^ $) this could look like:
\b(T\d*)(?:\?\d{2})?(\d+)\b
Example Python
Is the below what you want?
Use RegExReplace with multiline tag (m) and enable replace all occurrences!
Pattern = (T\d*)\?\d{2}(\d*)
replace = $1$2
Usage Example:
This question already has answers here:
Regular expression to match a line that doesn't contain a word
(34 answers)
Closed 2 years ago.
I know that I can negate group of chars as in [^bar] but I need a regular expression where negation applies to the specific word - so in my example how do I negate an actual bar, and not "any chars in bar"?
A great way to do this is to use negative lookahead:
^(?!.*bar).*$
The negative lookahead construct is the pair of parentheses, with the opening parenthesis followed by a question mark and an exclamation point. Inside the lookahead [is any regex pattern].
Unless performance is of utmost concern, it's often easier just to run your results through a second pass, skipping those that match the words you want to negate.
Regular expressions usually mean you're doing scripting or some sort of low-performance task anyway, so find a solution that is easy to read, easy to understand and easy to maintain.
Solution:
^(?!.*STRING1|.*STRING2|.*STRING3).*$
xxxxxx OK
xxxSTRING1xxx KO (is whether it is desired)
xxxSTRING2xxx KO (is whether it is desired)
xxxSTRING3xxx KO (is whether it is desired)
You could either use a negative look-ahead or look-behind:
^(?!.*?bar).*
^(.(?<!bar))*?$
Or use just basics:
^(?:[^b]+|b(?:$|[^a]|a(?:$|[^r])))*$
These all match anything that does not contain bar.
The following regex will do what you want (as long as negative lookbehinds and lookaheads are supported), matching things properly; the only problem is that it matches individual characters (i.e. each match is a single character rather than all characters between two consecutive "bar"s), possibly resulting in a potential for high overhead if you're working with very long strings.
b(?!ar)|(?<!b)a|a(?!r)|(?<!ba)r|[^bar]
I came across this forum thread while trying to identify a regex for the following English statement:
Given an input string, match everything unless this input string is exactly 'bar'; for example I want to match 'barrier' and 'disbar' as well as 'foo'.
Here's the regex I came up with
^(bar.+|(?!bar).*)$
My English translation of the regex is "match the string if it starts with 'bar' and it has at least one other character, or if the string does not start with 'bar'.
The accepted answer is nice but is really a work-around for the lack of a simple sub-expression negation operator in regexes. This is why grep --invert-match exits. So in *nixes, you can accomplish the desired result using pipes and a second regex.
grep 'something I want' | grep --invert-match 'but not these ones'
Still a workaround, but maybe easier to remember.
If it's truly a word, bar that you don't want to match, then:
^(?!.*\bbar\b).*$
The above will match any string that does not contain bar that is on a word boundary, that is to say, separated from non-word characters. However, the period/dot (.) used in the above pattern will not match newline characters unless the correct regex flag is used:
^(?s)(?!.*\bbar\b).*$
Alternatively:
^(?!.*\bbar\b)[\s\S]*$
Instead of using any special flag, we are looking for any character that is either white space or non-white space. That should cover every character.
But what if we would like to match words that might contain bar, but just not the specific word bar?
(?!\bbar\b)\b\[A-Za-z-]*bar[a-z-]*\b
(?!\bbar\b) Assert that the next input is not bar on a word boundary.
\b\[A-Za-z-]*bar[a-z-]*\b Matches any word on a word boundary that contains bar.
See Regex Demo
Extracted from this comment by bkDJ:
^(?!bar$).*
The nice property of this solution is that it's possible to clearly negate (exclude) multiple words:
^(?!bar$|foo$|banana$).*
I wish to complement the accepted answer and contribute to the discussion with my late answer.
#ChrisVanOpstal shared this regex tutorial which is a great resource for learning regex.
However, it was really time consuming to read through.
I made a cheatsheet for mnemonic convenience.
This reference is based on the braces [], (), and {} leading each class, and I find it easy to recall.
Regex = {
'single_character': ['[]', '.', {'negate':'^'}],
'capturing_group' : ['()', '|', '\\', 'backreferences and named group'],
'repetition' : ['{}', '*', '+', '?', 'greedy v.s. lazy'],
'anchor' : ['^', '\b', '$'],
'non_printable' : ['\n', '\t', '\r', '\f', '\v'],
'shorthand' : ['\d', '\w', '\s'],
}
Just thought of something else that could be done. It's very different from my first answer, as it doesn't use regular expressions, so I decided to make a second answer post.
Use your language of choice's split() method equivalent on the string with the word to negate as the argument for what to split on. An example using Python:
>>> text = 'barbarasdbarbar 1234egb ar bar32 sdfbaraadf'
>>> text.split('bar')
['', '', 'asd', '', ' 1234egb ar ', '32 sdf', 'aadf']
The nice thing about doing it this way, in Python at least (I don't remember if the functionality would be the same in, say, Visual Basic or Java), is that it lets you know indirectly when "bar" was repeated in the string due to the fact that the empty strings between "bar"s are included in the list of results (though the empty string at the beginning is due to there being a "bar" at the beginning of the string). If you don't want that, you can simply remove the empty strings from the list.
I had a list of file names, and I wanted to exclude certain ones, with this sort of behavior (Ruby):
files = [
'mydir/states.rb', # don't match these
'countries.rb',
'mydir/states_bkp.rb', # match these
'mydir/city_states.rb'
]
excluded = ['states', 'countries']
# set my_rgx here
result = WankyAPI.filter(files, my_rgx) # I didn't write WankyAPI...
assert result == ['mydir/city_states.rb', 'mydir/states_bkp.rb']
Here's my solution:
excluded_rgx = excluded.map{|e| e+'\.'}.join('|')
my_rgx = /(^|\/)((?!#{excluded_rgx})[^\.\/]*)\.rb$/
My assumptions for this application:
The string to be excluded is at the beginning of the input, or immediately following a slash.
The permitted strings end with .rb.
Permitted filenames don't have a . character before the .rb.
Hello again Stack Overflow. As i mentioned in my last post i am trying to get better at regular expressions. I am going through my books chapters tonight and decided to see if i could, if even possible create multiple groups. I am fully aware Regex is not the answer to everything this is purely for me to learn. I am Using VB.net
Example input(s):
MyTokenName{%#example1%, %#example2%}
MyTokenName{example1, example2}
Now this is a completed made up by myself output to test against. The consistent factors of this expression are Name{ } There will always be a name consisting of only a-z first. Inside of curly brackets. The MAIN delimiter that separates the Two groups is , Before the groups start there will be an OPTIONAL %# that ends with a OPTIONAL %
So to summarize i only want to match groups defined between the curly brackets of only a-z unlimited times.
MyTokenName{%#example%, %#example%} ----- Would match Two groups example1 and example2
MyTokenName{example, example} --- Would match Two groups example1 and example2
My attempt that's not working.
(?<=[a-zA-Z]+\{[^a-zA-Z#]+?)[a-zA-Z, ]+(?=%?})
Any advice would be amazing. Thanks guys for such a great forum. Please remember i am only trying to practice regex. I can do this with other .Net methods.
An interesting way could maybe this one:
/(?i)(?<=\{|\G|\{%#|\G%#)([a-z0-9]+)(?:%?\s*(?:,\s*|\}))/g
http://regex101.com/r/bU0zY5
Here's also a structural view of it:
Debuggex Demo
with interesting I mean the usage of lookbehind with \G ;) and it should match all your examples
This variable length lookbehind is expensive performance wise and of no real value in this case, when all you want to do is capture what your interrested in.
This might work.
[a-zA-z]+ { \s*(?:%#)? ([a-z]+) %?\s* , \s*(?:%#)? ([a-z]+) %?\s* }
Does the pattern (\w+) serve your purpose here?
It'll match MyTokenName, example1, and example2 in both sample cases.
If you always wanted to ignore MyTokenName you could just refer to any matches other than the first match in the list.
Like:
dim txt = "MyTokenName{%#example1%, %#example2%}"
dim matches = regex.matches(txt,"(\w+)")
for i as integer = 1 to (matches.count - 1)
DoSomethingWith(matches(i).value) 'start at 1 so we skip over MyTokenName
next
Something like that.
I am writing a paper with latex and accidentally wrote \cite[] instead of \cite{}.
I could just go over the whole document by hand but I want to know how to do this in notepad++ using regexes.
I initially tried \\cite\[(.*)\] and replace with \cite{\1} which works for simple cases such as
\cite[hello world] blah blah
However if there are two or more citations in a paragraph it matches all of them.
So for example
\cite[aaa]\cite[bbb] something here \cite[ccc]
matches the whole line
How can I get a non greedy match so that the above line would be matched as 3 separate matches
and the result of a replace command should give me
\cite{aaa}\cite{bbb} something here \cite{ccc}
Use a reluctant (aka non-greedy) expression:
\\cite\[(.*?)]
See a live demo.
The addition of the question mark changes the .* from greedy (the default) to reluctant so it will consume as little as possible to find a match, ie it won't skip over multiple search terms matching start of one term all the way to the end of another term.
ie using .* the match would be
foo \cite[aaa]\cite[bbb] something here \cite[ccc] bar
^----------------------1---------------------^
but with .*? the matches would be:
foo \cite[aaa]\cite[bbb] something here \cite[ccc] bar
^---1----^^----------------2-----------------^
Minor note: ] does not need escaping.
Better to use a more precises expression in the first place:
\\cite\[([^[\]]*)\]
You must be using Notepad++ version 6 or higher (they upgraded to the PCRE regex engine at V6).
This question already has answers here:
Regular expression to match a line that doesn't contain a word
(34 answers)
Closed 2 years ago.
I know that I can negate group of chars as in [^bar] but I need a regular expression where negation applies to the specific word - so in my example how do I negate an actual bar, and not "any chars in bar"?
A great way to do this is to use negative lookahead:
^(?!.*bar).*$
The negative lookahead construct is the pair of parentheses, with the opening parenthesis followed by a question mark and an exclamation point. Inside the lookahead [is any regex pattern].
Unless performance is of utmost concern, it's often easier just to run your results through a second pass, skipping those that match the words you want to negate.
Regular expressions usually mean you're doing scripting or some sort of low-performance task anyway, so find a solution that is easy to read, easy to understand and easy to maintain.
Solution:
^(?!.*STRING1|.*STRING2|.*STRING3).*$
xxxxxx OK
xxxSTRING1xxx KO (is whether it is desired)
xxxSTRING2xxx KO (is whether it is desired)
xxxSTRING3xxx KO (is whether it is desired)
You could either use a negative look-ahead or look-behind:
^(?!.*?bar).*
^(.(?<!bar))*?$
Or use just basics:
^(?:[^b]+|b(?:$|[^a]|a(?:$|[^r])))*$
These all match anything that does not contain bar.
The following regex will do what you want (as long as negative lookbehinds and lookaheads are supported), matching things properly; the only problem is that it matches individual characters (i.e. each match is a single character rather than all characters between two consecutive "bar"s), possibly resulting in a potential for high overhead if you're working with very long strings.
b(?!ar)|(?<!b)a|a(?!r)|(?<!ba)r|[^bar]
I came across this forum thread while trying to identify a regex for the following English statement:
Given an input string, match everything unless this input string is exactly 'bar'; for example I want to match 'barrier' and 'disbar' as well as 'foo'.
Here's the regex I came up with
^(bar.+|(?!bar).*)$
My English translation of the regex is "match the string if it starts with 'bar' and it has at least one other character, or if the string does not start with 'bar'.
The accepted answer is nice but is really a work-around for the lack of a simple sub-expression negation operator in regexes. This is why grep --invert-match exits. So in *nixes, you can accomplish the desired result using pipes and a second regex.
grep 'something I want' | grep --invert-match 'but not these ones'
Still a workaround, but maybe easier to remember.
If it's truly a word, bar that you don't want to match, then:
^(?!.*\bbar\b).*$
The above will match any string that does not contain bar that is on a word boundary, that is to say, separated from non-word characters. However, the period/dot (.) used in the above pattern will not match newline characters unless the correct regex flag is used:
^(?s)(?!.*\bbar\b).*$
Alternatively:
^(?!.*\bbar\b)[\s\S]*$
Instead of using any special flag, we are looking for any character that is either white space or non-white space. That should cover every character.
But what if we would like to match words that might contain bar, but just not the specific word bar?
(?!\bbar\b)\b\[A-Za-z-]*bar[a-z-]*\b
(?!\bbar\b) Assert that the next input is not bar on a word boundary.
\b\[A-Za-z-]*bar[a-z-]*\b Matches any word on a word boundary that contains bar.
See Regex Demo
Extracted from this comment by bkDJ:
^(?!bar$).*
The nice property of this solution is that it's possible to clearly negate (exclude) multiple words:
^(?!bar$|foo$|banana$).*
I wish to complement the accepted answer and contribute to the discussion with my late answer.
#ChrisVanOpstal shared this regex tutorial which is a great resource for learning regex.
However, it was really time consuming to read through.
I made a cheatsheet for mnemonic convenience.
This reference is based on the braces [], (), and {} leading each class, and I find it easy to recall.
Regex = {
'single_character': ['[]', '.', {'negate':'^'}],
'capturing_group' : ['()', '|', '\\', 'backreferences and named group'],
'repetition' : ['{}', '*', '+', '?', 'greedy v.s. lazy'],
'anchor' : ['^', '\b', '$'],
'non_printable' : ['\n', '\t', '\r', '\f', '\v'],
'shorthand' : ['\d', '\w', '\s'],
}
Just thought of something else that could be done. It's very different from my first answer, as it doesn't use regular expressions, so I decided to make a second answer post.
Use your language of choice's split() method equivalent on the string with the word to negate as the argument for what to split on. An example using Python:
>>> text = 'barbarasdbarbar 1234egb ar bar32 sdfbaraadf'
>>> text.split('bar')
['', '', 'asd', '', ' 1234egb ar ', '32 sdf', 'aadf']
The nice thing about doing it this way, in Python at least (I don't remember if the functionality would be the same in, say, Visual Basic or Java), is that it lets you know indirectly when "bar" was repeated in the string due to the fact that the empty strings between "bar"s are included in the list of results (though the empty string at the beginning is due to there being a "bar" at the beginning of the string). If you don't want that, you can simply remove the empty strings from the list.
I had a list of file names, and I wanted to exclude certain ones, with this sort of behavior (Ruby):
files = [
'mydir/states.rb', # don't match these
'countries.rb',
'mydir/states_bkp.rb', # match these
'mydir/city_states.rb'
]
excluded = ['states', 'countries']
# set my_rgx here
result = WankyAPI.filter(files, my_rgx) # I didn't write WankyAPI...
assert result == ['mydir/city_states.rb', 'mydir/states_bkp.rb']
Here's my solution:
excluded_rgx = excluded.map{|e| e+'\.'}.join('|')
my_rgx = /(^|\/)((?!#{excluded_rgx})[^\.\/]*)\.rb$/
My assumptions for this application:
The string to be excluded is at the beginning of the input, or immediately following a slash.
The permitted strings end with .rb.
Permitted filenames don't have a . character before the .rb.