Parsing a long column to multiple rows using RegEx? - regex

Question

I have a table where the history for a file's edits is stored off, one row per file. Most of them are pipe delimited so I transform the table into a 'one row one edit' style by parsing out the fields with this sort of thing:
LATERAL FLATTEN (INPUT => SPLIT(x.User,'|')) a
However, annoyingly one of the fields doesn't have pipes and instead has a timestamp between edits. (it's so people in the file can see the edit history) In our SAS world, I have a job (below) that parses it out using a RegEx and looping around to do the parse/transpose. Is such a thing doable in Snowflake?
data notesdata_parsed;
rx_date = prxparse('/[ ]\d+[\/]\d+[\/](2020|2021)[ ]\d+[:]\d+[:]\d+( AM -| PM -)/');
set notesdata;
where textfield ne '';
do while(1);
rx_pos = prxmatch(rx_date,textfield);
if rx_pos = 0 then
do;
textfield_new=textfield;
output;
leave;
end;
textfield_new = substr(textfield,1,rx_pos-1);
textfield=substr(textfield,rx_pos+1);
output;
end;
drop rx_date textfield rx_pos;
run;

Answer 1

I'm not sure of exact regex you'd need in Snowflake, but you could leverage the REGEXP_REPLACE function in Snowflake to make the date into a PIPE and then do your existing LATERAL FLATTEN type of thing.
Something along the lines of:
LATERAL FLATTEN (INPUT => SPLIT(REGEXP_REPLACE(x.User,'{regex expression}','|'),'|')) a
The regex syntax in Snowflake might be a little different, so I just used a placeholder there. I'm not an expert in Regex.