I'm trying to find and replace some function calls in py program. The idea is to add some boolean parameter to each call found on the project.
I looked for solutions on the internet 'cause I don't know regex science at all... It seems like a basic exercice for regex guys but still.
In my case I have this call in a lot of files :
myFunction("test")
My gooal is to find and replace this call into :
myFunction("test", false)
Could you help me write the regex ?
Try this command:
sed -re 's/(myFunction)[[:space:]]*\([[:space:]]*("test")[[:space:]]*\)/\1(\2, false)/' SOURCE_FILENAME
If you prefer to replace the existing source file with an updated one, then write -i SOURCE_FILENAME instead of SOURCE_FILENAME.
This works by defining a pattern to match the function call you would like to update:
myFunction (obviously) matches the text myFunction;
[[:space:]] matches any whitespace character, mainly spaces and tabs.
[[:space:]]* matches zero or more whitespace characters.
\( and \) match literal parenthesis in your program text;
( and ) are regex metacharacters that match nothing, but ("test") matches "test" and captures the matched text for later use.
Note that this pattern captures two things using ( and ). The ("test") is the second of these.
Now let us examine the overall structure of the Sed command 's/.../.../'. The s means "substitute," so 's/.../.../' is Sed's substitution command.
Between the first and second slashes comes the pattern we have just discussed. Between the second and third slashes comes the replacement text Sed uses to replace the matched part of any line of your program text that matches the pattern. Within the replacement text, the \1 and \2 are backreferences that place the text earlier captured using ( and ).
So, there it is. Not only have I helped you to write the regex but have shown you how the regex works so that, next time, you can write your own.
Refer this:
import re
#Replace all white-space characters with the digit "9":
str = "The rain in Spain"
x = re.sub("\s", "9", str)
print(x)
you could use this regex to match and capture
(myFunction\("test")(\))
then use the regex below to replace
$1, false$2
I am attempting to edit a csv file, below is a sample line from this file.
|MIGRATE|;|10000|;|2ACC0003|;|30/09/13|;|Positive Adjmt.|;||;|MIGRATE|;|95004U
The beginning of the line |MIGRATE| needs to be modified without changing the second MIGRATE so the line would read
|MIGRATE|;|MIG_IN|;|10000|;|2ACC0003|;|30/09/13|;|Positive Adjmt.|;||;|MIGRATE|;|95004U
There are 7700 or so lines so if I am forced to do this manually I will probably cry a little.
Thanks in advance!
Just replace all the ones you want not changed with another word temporarily, then replace the rest with what you want. I'm not sure what you're asking here, but from what I can guess this might help.
It seems like you could just search for Just search for:
^\|MIGRATE\|
And replace with:
|MIGRATE|;|MIG_IN|
Make sure you've checked 'Regular expression' in the 'Search Mode' options.
Explanation: The ^ is a begin anchor; it will match the beginning of the line, ensuring that it does not match the second |MIGRATE|. The \ characters are required to escape the | characters since they normally have special meaning in regular expressions, and you want to match a literal |.
You can use beginning of line anchors:
Find:
^(\|MIGRATE\|)
Replace with:
$1;|MIG_IN|
regex101 demo
Just make sure that you are using the regular expression mode of the Search&Replace.
If you want to be a bit fancier, you can use a positive lookbehind:
Find:
(?<=^\|MIGRATE\|)
Replace with:
;|MIG_IN|
^ Will match only at the beginning of a line.
( ... ) is called a capture group, and will save the contents of the match in variable you can use (in the first regex, I accessed the variable using $1 in the replace. The first capture gets stored to $1, the second to $2, etc.)
| is a special character meaning 'or' in regex (to match a character or group of characters or another, e.g. a|b matches a or b. As such, you need to escape it with a backslash to make a regex match a literal |.
In my second regex, I used (?<= ... ) which is called a positive lookbehind. It makes sure that the part to be matched has what's inside before it. For instance, (?<=a)b matches a b only if it has an a before it. So that the b in ab matches but not in bb.
The website I linked also explains the details of the regex and you can try out some regex yourself!
I'm so close to understanding regex. I'm a bit stumped, I thought i understood lazy and greedy.
Here is my current regex: <g_n><!\[CDATA\[([^]]+)(?=]]><\/g_n>)
My current regex makes:
<g_n><![CDATA[xxxxxxxxxx]]></g_n>
match to:
<g_n><![CDATA[xxxxxxxxxx
But I want to make it match like this:
xxxxxxxxxx
You want
<g_n><!\[CDATA\[(.*?)]]></g_n>
then if you want to replace it use
\1
in the replacement box
Your matching the whole string, the brackets around the .*? match all of that and put it in the \1 variable
So the match will be all of the string with \1 referring to what you want
To change the xxxxx
Regex :
(<g_n><![CDATA[)(?:.*?)(]]></g_n>)
Replacement
\1WHAT YOU WANT TO CHANGE TO\2
It looks like you need to add escape slashes to the two closing square brackets, as they are literals from the string you're parsing.
<g_n><!\[CDATA\[.*+?\]\]><\/g_n>
^ ^
Any square brackets not being escaped by backslashes will be treated as regex operational brackets, which in this case won't catch the input string.
EDIT, I think the +? is redundant.
\[.*\]\]> ...
should suffice, since .* means any character, any amount of times.
Tested with notepad++ 6.3.2:
find: (<g_n><!\[CDATA\[)([^]]+)(?=]]></g_n>)
replace: $1WhatYouWant
You can replace + by * in the pattern to match void CDATA:
<g_n><![CDATA[]]></g_n>
I am doing this in groovy.
Input:
hip_abc_batch hip_ndnh_4_abc_copy_from_stgig abc_copy_from_stgig
hiv_daiv_batch hip_a_de_copy_from_staging abc_a_de_copy_from_staging
I want to get the last column. basically anything that starts with abc_.
I tried the following regex (works for second line but not second.
\abc_.*\
but that gives me everything after abc_batch
I am looking for a regex that will fetch me anything that starts with abc_
but I can not use \^abc_.*\ since the whole string does not start with abc_
It sounds like you're looking for "words" (i.e., sequences that don't include spaces) that begin with abc_. You might try:
/\babc_.*\b/
The \b means (in some regular expression flavors) "word boundary."
Try this:
/\s(abc_.*)$/m
Here is a commented version so you can understand how it works:
\s # match one whitepace character
(abc_.*) # capture a string that starts with "abc_" and is followed
# by any character zero or more times
$ # match the end of the string
Since the regular expression has the "m" switch it will be a multi-line expression. This allows the $ to match the end of each line rather than the end of the entire string itself.
You don't need to trim the whitespace as the second capture group contains just the text. After a cursory scan of this tutorial I believe this is the way to grab the value of a capture group using Groovy:
matcher = (yourString =~ /\s(abc_.*)$/m)
// this is how you would extract the value from
// the matcher object
matcher[0][1]
I think you are looking for this: \s(abc_[a-zA-Z_]*)$
If you are using perl and you read all lines into one string, don't forget to set the the m option on your regex (that stands for "Treat string as multiple lines").
Oh, and Regex Coach is your free friend.
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