Regex match hyphenated word with hyphen-less query - regex

I have an Azure Storage Table set up that possesses lots of values containing hyphens, apostrophes, and other bits of punctuation that the Azure Indexers don't like. Hyphenated-Word gets broken into two tokens — Hyphenated and Word — upon indexing. Accordingly, this means that searching for HyphenatedWord will not yield any results, regardless of any wildcard or fuzzy matching characters. That said, Azure Cognitive Search possesses support for Regex Lucene queries...
As such, I'm trying to find out if there's a Regex pattern I can use to match words with or without hyphens to a given query. As an example, the query homework should match the results homework and home-work.
I know that if I were trying to do the opposite — match unhyphenated words even when a hyphen is provided in the query — I would use something like /home(-)?work/. However, I'm not sure what the inverse looks like — if such a thing exists.
Is there a raw Regex pattern that will perform the kind of matching I'm proposing? Or am I SOL?
Edit: I should point out that the example I provided is unrealistic because I won't always know where a hyphen should be. Optimally, the pattern that performs this matching would be agnostic to the precise placement of a hyphen.
Edit 2: A solution I've discovered that works but isn't exactly optimal (and, though I have no way to prove this, probably isn't performant) is to just break down the query, remove all of the special characters that cause token breaks, and then dynamically build a regex query that has an optional match in between every character in the query. Using the homework example, the pattern would look something like [-'\.! ]?h[-'\.! ]?o[-'\.! ]?m[-'\.! ]?e[-'\.! ]?w[-'\.! ]?o[-'\.! ]?r[-'\.! ]?k[-'\.! ]?...which is perhaps the ugliest thing I've ever seen. Nevertheless, it gets the job done.

My solution to scenarios like this is always to introduce content- and query-processing.
Content processing is easier when you use the push model via the SDK, but you could achieve the same by creating a shadow/copy of your table where the content is manipulated for indexing purposes. You let your original table stay intact. And then you maintain a duplicate table where your text is processed.
Query processing is something you should use regardless. In its simplest form you want to clean the input from the end users before you use it in a query. Additional steps can be to handle special characters like a hyphen. Either escape it, strip it, or whatever depending on what your requirements are.
EXAMPLE
I have to support searches for ordering codes that may contain hyphens or other special characters. The maintainers of our ordering codes may define ordering codes in an inconsistent format. Customers visiting our sites are just as inconsistent.
The requirement is that ABC-123-DE_F-4.56G should match any of
ABC-123-DE_F-4.56G
ABC123-DE_F-4.56G
ABC_123_DE_F_4_56G
ABC.123.DE.F.4.56G
ABC 123 DEF 56 G
ABC123DEF56G
I solve this using my suggested approach above. I use content processing to generate a version of the ordering code without any special characters (using a simple regex). Then, I use query processing to transform the end user's input into an OR-query, like:
<verbatim-user-input-cleaned> OR OrderCodeVariation:<verbatim-user-input-without-special-chars>
So, if the user entered ABC.123.DE.F.4.56G I would effecively search for
ABC.123.DE.F.4.56G OR OrderingCodeVariation:ABC123DEF56G

It sounds like you want to define your own tokenization. Would using a custom tokenizer help? https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/search/index-add-custom-analyzers

To add onto Jennifer's answer, you could consider using a custom analyzer consisting of either of these token filters:
pattern_replace: A token filter which applies a pattern to each token in the stream, replacing match occurrences with the specified replacement string.
pattern_capture: Uses Java regexes to emit multiple tokens, one for each capture group in one or more patterns.
You could use the pattern_replace token filter to replace hyphens with the desired character, maybe an empty character.

Related

Individually shorten URLs in Hive

I have URLs of the following structure:
https://pinball.globalzone.com/en_US/home?tic=1-dj33jl-dj33jl&goToRegisterNow=true
What I want to do now is to shorten the URLs to be able to group and count similar URL patterns. For instance, I want to cut out https://, the locale en_US/ and the token ?tic=1-dj33jl-dj33jl while keeping the rest. The result should look as follows:
pinball.globalzone.com/home&goToRegisterNow=true
I tried to achieve that by using regexp_extract but this method only lets me extract specific pieces that are always at the same position.
The bigger problem is that the parts I want to cut out are either individual/rule-based (i.e. the locale always contains of two lower case and two upper case letters separated by a underscore) or unique with no guaranteed length (i.e. the token).
Moreover, my resultset will also contain URLs with a different pattern in which I only want to cut the existing parts (e.g. https://pinball.globalzone.com/en_US/forgottenPassword, in which only en_US/ has to be cut out).
If I would have to solve the problem quickly I would just get URLs and write some piece of Java or R code to split the get URLs into pieces and iterate through the array while cutting out all parts I don't need. However, I was wondering if there is a more elegant way to get this result straight out of Hive.
What about
(?:https?:\/\/|\/[a-z]{2}_[A-Z]{2}|[?&]tic=[^&?]*)
It matches the parts you've described as unwanted. Replace that with an empty string should leave you with what you want.
See it here at regex101.
Edit
Updated to check for tic=. Should make it more stable.
And I don't know if it's what you want, but this one allows tic= to be any parameter, not only the first:
(?:https?:\/\/|\/[a-z]{2}_[A-Z]{2}|[?&]tic=[^&?\n]*)
Here at regex101

Non printable regex

I am in need of a regex that will match non printable characters. The reason being is that I have a hailstorm spammer that is abusing my network and is getting past my PCRE based heuristic filter by obfuscating his subjects with non printable characters. Therefore, any text based rules I create are bypassed because there is no match.
For example:
The regular text based subject: Reduce tech cоsts with clоud cоmputing
The obfuscated subject:
Reduce tech cоsts with clоud cоmputing
ReduÑe teÑh cоsts with Ñlоud Ñоmputing
ReduÑe teÑh Ñosts with Ñloud Ñomputing
Rеducе tеch cоsts with Ñlоud Ñоmputing
What I am looking for is a regex that I can modify to match all of the phrases that have been used and build a list of regexes.
Maybe, if I can get a regex that will match the subjects, I can meta them together with other matching header information that will thwart these messages.
Any help would be much appreciated.
You can use the following to match.
(Reduce|ReduÑe|Rеducе)\s*(tech|teÑh|tеch)\s*
(cоsts|Ñosts)\s*(with)\s*(clоud|Ñlоud|Ñloud)\s*
(cоmputing|Ñоmputing|Ñomputing)
You can add the unique keywords that have been used in the particular group (reduce, tech, etc) and the above regex handles the different combinations of phrases that can be made using the keywords.
For example, above regex restricts 3x3x2x1x3x3 (162 ways) of spamming using given keywords.
EDIT: You can use [^\w\s."'\/\\=!##$%^&*(){}\[\]?><,+|`~-]+ for checking if subject contains characters that are not printable, and take actions on it. (If you are using this, you might need to add other regexes to handle spam phrases that can be created with printable characters)
Demo with PCRE

Is rearranging words of text possible with RegEx?

I've got a list of devices in a database, such as Model X123 ABC. Another portion of the system accepts user input and needs to, as well as possible, match their entries to the existing devices. But the users have the ability to enter anything they want. They might enter the above model as Model 100 ABC X123 or Model X123.
Understand, this is a general example, and the permutations of available models and matching user entries is enormous, and I'm just trying to match as many as possible so that the manual corrections can be kept to a minimum.
The system is built in FileMaker, but has access to pretty much any plugin I wish, which means I have access to Groovy, PHP, JavaScript, etc. I'm currently working with Groovy using the ScriptMaster plugin for other simple regex pattern matching elsewhere, and I'm wondering if the most straightforward way to do this is to use regex.
My thinking with regex is that I'm looking for patterns, but I'm unsure if I can say, "Assign this grouping to this pattern regardless of where it is in the order of pattern groups." Above, I want to find if the string contains three patterns: (?i)\bmodel\b, (?i)\b[a-z]\d{3}\b, and (?i)\b[a-z]{3}\b, but I don't care about what order they come in. If all three are found, I want to place them in that specific order: first the word "model", capitalized, then the all-caps alphanumeric code and finally the pure alphabetical code in all-caps.
Can (should?) regex handle this?
I suggest tokenizing the input into words, matching each of them against the supported tokens, and assembling them into canonical categorized slots.
Even better would be to offer search suggestions when the user enters the information, and require the user to pick a suggestion.
But you could do it by (programmatically) constructing a monster regex pattern with all the premutations:
\b(?:(model)\s+([a-z]\d{3})\s+([a-z]{3})
|(model)\s+([a-z]{3})\s+([a-z]\d{3})
|([a-z]\d{3})\s+(model)\s+([a-z]{3})
|([a-z]\d{3})\s+([a-z]{3})(model)
|([a-z]{3})(model)\s+([a-z]\d{3})
|([a-z]{3})\s+([a-z]\d{3})\s+(model)
)\b
It'd have to use named capturing groups but I left that out in the hopes that the above might be close to readable.
I'm not sure I fully understand your underlying objective -- is this to be able to match up like products (e.g., products with the same model number)? If so, a word permutations function like this one could be used in a calculated field to create a multikey: http://www.briandunning.com/cf/1535
If you need partial matching in FileMaker, you could also use a redux search function like this one: http://www.fmfunctions.com/fid/380
Feel free to PM me if you have questions that aren't a good format to post here.

How to efficiently match an input string against several regular expressions at once?

How would one efficiently match one input string against any number of regular expressions?
One scenario where this might be useful is with REST web services. Let's assume that I have come up with a number of URL patterns for a REST web service's public interface:
/user/with-id/{userId}
/user/with-id/{userId}/profile
/user/with-id/{userId}/preferences
/users
/users/who-signed-up-on/{date}
/users/who-signed-up-between/{fromDate}/and/{toDate}
…
where {…} are named placeholders (like regular expression capturing groups).
Note: This question is not about whether the above REST interface is well-designed or not. (It probably isn't, but that shouldn't matter in the context of this question.)
It may be assumed that placeholders usually do not appear at the very beginning of a pattern (but they could). It can also be safely assumed that it is impossible for any string to match more than one pattern.
Now the web service receives a request. Of course, one could sequentially match the requested URI against one URL pattern, then against the next one, and so on; but that probably won't scale well for a larger number of patterns that must be checked.
Are there any efficient algorithms for this?
Inputs:
An input string
A set of "mutually exclusive" regular expressions (ie. no input string may match more than one expression)
Output:
The regular expression (if any) that the input string matched against.
The Aho-Corasick algorithm is a very fast algorithm to match an input string against a set of patterns (actually keywords), that are preprocessed and organized in a trie, to speedup matching.
There are variations of the algorithm to support regex patterns (ie. http://code.google.com/p/esmre/ just to name one) that are probably worth a look.
Or, you could split the urls in chunks, organize them in a tree, then split the url to match and walk the tree one chunk at a time. The {userId} can be considered a wildcard, or match some specific format (ie. be an int).
When you reach a leaf, you know which url you matched
The standard solution for matching multiple regular expressions against an input stream is a lexer-generator such as Flex (there are lots of these avalable, typically several for each programming langauge).
These tools take a set of regular expressions associated with "tokens" (think of tokens as just names for whatever a regular expression matches) and generates efficient finite-state automata to match all the regexes at the same time. This is linear time with a very small constant in the size of the input stream; hard to ask for "faster" than this. You feed it a character stream, and it emits the token name of the regex that matches "best" (this handles the case where two regexes can match the same string; see the lexer generator for the definition of this), and advances the stream by what was recognized. So you can apply it again and again to match the input stream for a series of tokens.
Different lexer generators will allow you to capture different bits of the recognized stream in differnt ways, so you can, after recognizing a token, pick out the part you care about (e.g., for a literal string in quotes, you only care about the string content, not the quotes).
If there is a hierarchy in the url structure, that should be used to maximize performance. Only an url that starts with /user/ can match any of the first three and so on.
I suggest storing the hierarchy to match in a tree corresponding to the url hierarchy, where each node matches a level in the hierarchy. To match an url, test the url against all roots of the tree where only nodes with regexes for "user" and "users" are. Matching url:s are tested against the children of those nodes until a match is found in a leaf node. A succesful match can be returned as the list of nodes from the root to the leaf. Named groups with property values such as {user-id} can be fetched from the nodes of the successful match.
Use named expressions and the OR operator, i.e. "(?P<re1>...)|(?P<re2>...)|...".
First I though that I couldn't see any good optimization for this process.
However, if you have a really large number of regexes you might want to partition them (I'm not sure if this is technically partitioning).
What I tell you to do is:
Suppose that you have 20 possible urls that start with user:
/user/with-id/X
/user/with-id/X/preferences # instead of preferences, you could have another 10 possibilities like /friends, /history, etc
Then, you also have 20 possible urls starting with users:
/users/who-signed-up-on
/users/who-signed-up-on-between #others: /registered-for, /i-might-like, etc
And the list goes on for /products, /companies, etc instead of users.
What you could do in this case is using "multi-level" matching.
First, match the start of the string. You'd be matching for /products, /companies, /users, one at a time and ignoring the rest of the string. This way, you don't have to test all the 100 possibilities.
After you know the url starts with /users, you can match only the possible urls that start with users.
This way, you would reduce a lot of unneeded matches. You won't match the string for all the /procucts possibilities.

Regex Pattern Matching Concatenation

Is it possible to concatenate the results of Regex Pattern Matching using only Regex syntax?
The specific instance is a program is allowing regex syntax to pull info from a file, but I would like it to pull from several portions and concatenate the results.
For instance:
Input string: 1234567890
Desired result string: 2389
Regex Pattern match: (?<=1).+(?=4)%%(?<=7).+(?=0)
Where %% represents some form of concatenation syntax. Using starting and ending with syntax is important since I know the field names but not the values of the field.
Does a keyword that functions like %% exist? Is there a more clever way to do this? Must the code be changed to allow multiple regex inputs, automatically concatenating?
Again, the pieces to be concatenated may be far apart with unknown characters in between. All that is known is the information surrounding the substrings.
2011-08-08 edit: The program is written in C#, but changing the code is a major undertaking compared to finding a regex-based solution.
Without knowing exactly what you want to match and what language you're using, it's impossible to give you an exact answer. However, the usual way to approach something like this is to use grouping.
In C#:
string pattern = #"(?<=1)(.+)(?=4).+(?<=7)(.+)(?=0)";
Match m = Regex.Match(input, pattern);
string result = m.Groups[0] + m.Groups[1];
The same approach can be applied to many other languages as well.
Edit
If you are not able to change the code, then there's no way to accomplish what you want. The reason is that in C#, the regex string itself doesn't have any power over the output. To change the result, you'd have to either change the called method of the Regex class or do some additional work afterwards. As it is, the method called most likely just returns either a Match object or a list of matching objects, neither of which will do what you want, regardless of the input regex string.