I'm quite new to using regex so I hope there's someone who can help me out. I want to set up an event on Google Tag Manager through RegEx that fires whenever someone views a page. I'm trying to do this using the Page URL as a parameter so that the event hits, when that URL is visited. Its for around 1400 urls that are in the same sub-folder but have a different page name. For example: https://www.example.com/products/product-name-1, https://www.example.com/products/product-name-2
What would be the best way to group these into one RegEx formula?
I've tried to separate all urls by using the '|' sign without any result. I've also tried this format, without any luck: (^/page-url-1/$|^/page-url-1/$|^/page-url-1/$|^/page-url-1/$)
A couple things are happening with your attempt. First, you aren't escaping the '/'. This is a reserved or special character and you will need to precede it with a \ to tell the engine that you want that specific character. It would look like this:
\/products\/page-url-1
I am assuming you are using a {{Page Path}} so the above would match for any paths that contain /products/page-url-1.
If you want the event to fire on all pages within the /products directory, there is an easier way of doing this.
\/products\/.*
what this will do is match any pages within your /products directory. If you have a landing page on /products, this will be omitted from the firing. The '.' means it will then match any character after the / and '*' means it can do this unlimited times.
EDIT:
Since you aren't looking for all the products pages, you can you a matching group and list them all. I suspect that all the product names will be different enough and not share any common path elements so you will have to list out the ones want.
\/products\/(product-url-1|product-url-2|product-url-3).*
Related
We are trying to clean up our site map as our Magento store has created duplicate pages. I want to use a regular expression to select, or invert select, all of the pages which are linked to the top level URL.
For example, we want to find the first line-
/site/product<<
/site/category/product/
/site/category/product
Is there any way to find only two instances of a forward slash in the whole string, which are not next to each other?
Thank you for your help in advance.
I've tried something like this
(.*(?<!\/)$)
Your pattern (.*(?<!\/)$) matches any char except a newline until the end of the string and after that asserts that what is on the left is not a forward slash which will give you the first and the third match.
You could match from the start of the string ^ 2 times a forward slash and then 1+ times not a forward slash or a newline [^/\n]+ and then assert the end of the string $
^/[^/\n]+/[^/\n]+$
Regex demo
I would like like to provide a quick answer to this problem in case it helps anyone else in the future. Our sitemap had too many duplicate URLs due to an incorrect set up on our Magento store. Instead of submitting a sitemap with 20,000+ top-level URLs we decided to manually remove the top level items ourselves.
Not ideal at all.
We tweaked with the site map PHP generation code to pull top-level URLs as site/category/id/###. Then we used Notepad++ to bookmark and delete these lines accordingly.
So, I'm trying to crawl a website that has like 7,000 product pages and the link structure is like this:
https://example.com/category/sub-category/numericid-name-of-the-product/
What I'm trying to achieve is to Generate a URL list, the Kimono App has that option, and it actually sections the URL but I'm only offered default value, range, and custom list.
I tried to put in stuff like "/.+/" to match all the chars, but that does not work, I couldn't find any help on that on official kb.
.I know that import.io had that "{alpahnumeric}" for example for different parts of URL so it matches them, is there a way to accomplish that in kimonolabs app?
Try this regex: https://example.com/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([0-9]+)-([^/]+)
Note: you may need to escape some characters (namely / would be escaped as \/).
Also, I'm not familiar with KimonoLabs, so I don't know if this is what you're looking for exactly. Feel free to clarify.
Explanation
https://example.com/ literally
([^/]+)/ a bunch of not /s, followed by a /
([0-9]+)-([^/]+) Numbers followed by another bunch of not /s
I am trying to create a regexp to fire a tag within Google Tag Manager on certain pages.
The issue I am having is that I do not want to fire this tag on URLs matching a querystring in them, since it is only a session identifier and I do not need the tag to fire on the pages that have a query string. These are basically duplicates and they do not need tracking in a 3rd party tracking program. I know how I could exclude them in GA, but I can't figure out how to do it for the third party tracking.
I'll detail the scenario below and what I have tried.
Example pages that come up in my URL report if I look in GA:
/page
/page/subpage?my-handsome-query-string&some-other-data
/page/subpage
/page/subpage/subsubpage
/page/?query-string-again
So what I want to do is to fire the tracking on pages that does NOT have the query string, and it is proving quite the issue.
If I put in ^/page.*[^\?] it just doesn't work. I guess I am completely using the negated character class all wrong? I can't get it working and would require some assistance on how to devise a better regexp.
Some other I tried were:
^/page/.* but this one only matched everything after /page/ but not /page.
I am not very good with regular expressions, so what I basically want to do is match /page, /page/subpage, /page/subpage/subpage etc, but not any URL that has a query string in it.
In GTM I can't create two rules that says "Include {{url path}} matching this" and "Exclude {{url path}} matching \?", so it all needs to be done within one regexp... And that totally got me at a loss.
Edit: Mike gave a good answer to solve my GTM part, but I am still interested in learning if it is possible to do above but with a single regex?
You can actually create two rules as you described.
In GTM, tags can have both Firing rules and Blocking rules. Blocking takes precedence. eg.
Firing rule:
{{url}} matches ^page/.*
Blocking rule:
{{url}} does not contain ?
Another option is to use a custom javascript macro.
It is in the form of a function(){ } which can detect a query string value in window.location.search and return boolean. Then have a firing rule {{your custom fn}} equals 1.
You can also create a macro which uses the URL macro type and Query component type.
The value is set to the query string without the leading ?. If the url was example.com?foo=bar this macro would contain foo=bar. Then simply add a firing rule {{query}} matches Regex ^$ or {{query}} does not contain something-that-will-never-be-in-the-url-to-avoid-regex
I'm using CodeIgniter to write an app where a user will be allowed to register an account and is assigned a URL (URL slug) of their choosing (ex. domain.com/user-name). CodeIgniter has a URL routing feature that allows the utilization of regular expressions (link).
User's are only allowed to register URL's that contain alphanumeric characters, dashes (-), and under scores (_). This is the regex I'm using to verify the validity of the URL slug: ^[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9_-]{2,254}$
I am using the url routing feature to route a few url's to features on my site (ex. /home -> /pages/index, /activity -> /user/activity) so those particular URL's obviously cannot be registered by a user.
I'm largely inexperienced with regular expressions but have attempted to write an expression that would match any URL slugs with alphanumerics/dash/underscore except if they are any of the following:
default_controller
404_override
home
activity
Here is the code I'm using to try to match the words with that specific criteria:
$route['(?!default_controller|404_override|home|activity)[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9_-]{2,254}'] = 'view/slug/$1';
but it isn't routing properly. Can someone help? (side question: is it necessary to have ^ or $ in the regex when trying to match with URL's?)
Alright, let's pick this apart.
Ignore CodeIgniter's reserved routes.
The default_controller and 404_override portions of your route are unnecessary. Routes are compared to the requested URI to see if there's a match. It is highly unlikely that those two items will ever be in your URI, since they are special reserved routes for CodeIgniter. So let's forget about them.
$route['(?!home|activity)[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9_-]{2,254}'] = 'view/slug/$1';
Capture everything!
With regular expressions, a group is created using parentheses (). This group can then be retrieved with a back reference - in our case, the $1, $2, etc. located in the second part of the route. You only had a group around the first set of items you were trying to exclude, so it would not properly capture the entire wild card. You found this out yourself already, and added a group around the entire item (good!).
$route['((?!home|activity)[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9_-]{2,254})'] = 'view/slug/$1';
Look-ahead?!
On that subject, the first group around home|activity is not actually a traditional group, due to the use of ?! at the beginning. This is called a negative look-ahead, and it's a complicated regular expression feature. And it's being used incorrectly:
Negative lookahead is indispensable if you want to match something not followed by something else.
There's a LOT more I could go into with this, but basically we don't really want or need it in the first place, so I'll let you explore if you'd like.
In order to make your life easier, I'd suggest separating the home, activity, and other existing controllers in the routes. CodeIgniter will look through the list of routes from top to bottom, and once something matches, it stops checking. So if you specify your existing controllers before the wild card, they will match, and your wild card regular expression can be greatly simplified.
$route['home'] = 'pages';
$route['activity'] = 'user/activity';
$route['([A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9_-]{2,254})'] = 'view/slug/$1';
Remember to list your routes in order from most specific to least. Wild card matches are less specific than exact matches (like home and activity), so they should come after (below).
Now, that's all the complicated stuff. A little more FYI.
Remember that dashes - have a special meaning when in between [] brackets. You should escape them if you want to match a literal dash.
$route['([A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9_\-]{2,254})'] = 'view/slug/$1';
Note that your character repetition min/max {2,254} only applies to the second set of characters, so your user names must be 3 characters at minimum, and 255 at maximum. Just an FYI if you didn't realize that already.
I saw your own answer to this problem, and it's just ugly. Sorry. The ^ and $ symbols are used improperly throughout the lookahead (which still shouldn't be there in the first place). It may "work" for a few use cases that you're testing it with, but it will just give you problems and headaches in the future.
Hopefully now you know more about regular expressions and how they're matched in the routing process.
And to answer your question, no, you should not use ^ and $ at the beginning and end of your regex -- CodeIgniter will add that for you.
Use the 404, Luke...
At this point your routes are improved and should be functional. I will throw it out there, though, that you might want to consider using the controller/method defined as the 404_override to handle your wild cards. The main benefit of this is that you don't need ANY routes to direct a wild card, or to prevent your wild card from goofing up existing controllers. You only need:
$route['404_override'] = 'view/slug';
Then, your View::slug() method would check the URI, and see if it's a valid pattern, then check if it exists as a user (same as your slug method does now, no doubt). If it does, then you're good to go. If it doesn't, then you throw a 404 error.
It may not seem that graceful, but it works great. Give it a shot if it sounds better for you.
I'm not familiar with codeIgniter specifically, but most frameworks routing operate based on precedence. In other words, the default controller, 404, etc routes should be defined first. Then you can simplify your regex to only match the slugs.
Ok answering my own question
I've seem to come up with a different expression that works:
$route['(^(?!default_controller$|404_override$|home$|activity$)[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9_-]{2,254}$)'] = 'view/slug/$1';
I added parenthesis around the whole expression (I think that's what CodeIgniter matches with $1 on the right) and added a start of line identifier: ^ and a bunch of end of line identifiers: $
Hope this helps someone who may run into this problem later.
I have a long HTML file that contains the names of organizations and their URL's. Each organization's "section" in the code is demarcated by the word "organization" followed by a lot of code, with their URL located inside that code, and ends with the word "organization".
For example:
organization -- a lot of code (with the URL located somewhere inside) -- organization
I have tried to use regex to search and extract the URL, but to no avail.
organization(?<Protocol>\w+):\/\/(?<Domain>[\w#][\w.:#]+)\/?[\w\.?=%&=\ #/$,]*organization
I suspect my problem lies somewhere in my trying to demarcate the search for URL's by just using the word "organization", but I am not sure.
Try group 1 from this:
organization.*\b(\w+://[\w.?%&=#/$,-]+).*?organization
Your current regex is searching for something sandwiched immediately between two instances of "organization". If there's any chance of characters existing between "organization" and your URL, you'll need to introduce a non-greedy match for any instances of anything (.*?), and if there are newlines in the mix you'll need to use (?:.|\n)*?.
So your regex becomes:
organization(?:.|\n)*?(?<Protocol>\w+):\/\/(?<Domain>[\w#][\w.:#]+)\/?[\w\.?=%&=\ #/$,]*(?:.|\n)*?organization
(Because of the bold insertions, this mistakenly appears to have spaces, but it does not. If you select it and copy/paste, it will paste correctly without spaces)