Given the below text, I want to extract county, state and zipcode i.e. BROWNSBURG, IN 46112.
With my current Regex Expression --
text = "BROWNSBURG, IN 46112 10 Other income (loss) 15 Alternative minimum tax (AMT) items"
regex = ([A-z]*[\S][\s]{1}[A-z]{2}[\d\s]+)
output = BROWNSBURG, IN 46112 10
It is extracting BROWNSBURG, IN 46112 10, I don't want this redundant 10. Can anyone please suggest the change in the above regex as it is working fine for most of the documents?
With only one example being provided, I will start out with assuming that the match you're looking for is always at the beginning of the line?
If so, it would be much safer to add the ^ anchor. Otherwise, you should remove it.
^[A-Z\s]+,\s[A-Z]{2}\s\d{5}
When we break down the pattern, you will see why this works:
^ asserts the beginning of the line (remove if necessary)
[A-Z\s]+ will match any letter or space that comes prior to the ,\s. The space is important in the event of counties/cities that contain more than one word.
[A-Z]{2} must match a 2-letter state code
Then finally, \d{5} will match on the 5-digit zip code.
Here is your custom view of your pattern in action.
Placing your pattern in a capturing group is unnecessary. You can simply return the full match, as it will be the same as the submatch. And while this one seems to be pretty simple, please understand that there are different implementations of Regular Expressions in different languages, so specifying the language in your question tags may prove to be useful in the future.
Related
Firstly, apologies; I'm fairly new to the world of RegEx.
Secondly (more of an FYI), I'm using an application that only has RegEx Replace functionality, therefore I'm potentially going to be limited on what can/can't be achieved.
The Challange
I have a free text field (labelled Description) that primarily contains "useless" text. However, some records will contain either one or multiple IDs that are useful and I would like to extract said IDs.
Every ID will have the same three-letter prefix (APP) followed by a five digit numeric value (e.g. 12911).
For example, I have the following string in my Description Field;
APP00001Was APP00002TEST APP00003Blah blah APP00004 Apple APP11112OrANGE APP
THE JOURNEY
I've managed to very crudely put together an expression that is close to what I need (although, I actually need the reverse);
/!?APP\d{1,5}/g
Result;
THE STRUGGLE
However, on the Replace, I'm only able to retain the non-matched values;
Was TEST Blah blah Apple OrANGE APP
THE ENDGAME
I would like the output to be;
APP00001 APP00002 APP00003 APP00004 APP11112
Apologies once again if this is somewhat of a 'noddy' question; but any help would be much appreciated and all ideas welcome.
Many thanks in advance.
You could use an alternation | to capture either the pattern starting with a word boundary in group 1 or match 1+ word chars followed by optional whitespace chars.
What you capture in group 1 can be used as the replacement. The matches will not be in the replacement.
Using !? matches an optional exclamation mark. You could prepend that to the pattern, but it is not part of the example data.
\b(APP\d{1,5})\w*|\w+\s*
See a regex demo
In the replacement use capture group 1, mostly using $1 or \1
I'm trying to looking for Street|St|Drive|Dr and then get all the contents of the line to extract the address:
(?:(?!\s{2,}|\$).)*(Street|St|Drive|Dr).*?(?=\s{2,})
.. but it also matches:
Full match 420-442 ` Tax Invoice/Statement`
Group 1. 433-435 `St`
Full match 4858-4867 `163.66 DR`
Group 1. 4865-4867 `DR`
Full match 11053-11089 ` Permanent Water Saving Plan, please`
Group 1. 11077-11079 `Pl`
How do i match only whole words and not substrings so it ignores words that contain those words (the first match for example).
One option is to use the the word-boundary anchor, \b, to accomplish this:
(?:(?!\s{2,}|\$).)*\b(Street|St|Drive|Dr)\b.*?(?=\s{2,})
If you provide an example of the raw text you're parsing, I'll be able to give additional help if this doesn't work.
Edit:
From the link you posted in a comment, it seems that the \b solution solves your question:
How do i match only whole words and not substrings so it ignores words that contain those words (the first match for example).
However, it seems like there are additional issues with your regex.
I am trying to extract cities and countries from several articles. The regular expression that I am using:
(at [A-Z](?:\w+)?|in [A-Z](?:\w+)?|of [A-Z](?:\w+)?)
It allows me to extract this kind of location:
of Mogadishu
in Istanbul
of Beletwein
However, it doesn't allow me to extract the location when is formulated as follows:
in downtown Tunis
in central Mogadishu
in a town near Mogadishu
What I would like to extract is any word starting with an uppercase after prepositions like (in,of,through, at) within a range of 3 words.
[In the link there is a sample of the text corpus] (https://regex101.com/r/0DRayP/6) and the regular expression
\b(at|in|of) (?:\w+\s){0,3}([A-Z]\w+)
I believe that hits everything in your example text.
\b makes sure the preposition is by itself and not part of another word.
The first group hits a preposition, which is easily modifiable to add more.
The second group isn't capturing and you can modify the number of additional words between the prep and location in the {0,3} bracket.
The third group gets your location.
Have a try with:
\b(?:at|in|of)\b[^A-Z]+([A-Z]\w*)
May be something like this (you can change number of words):
(at|in|of)( \w+){0,2} [A-Z](?:\w+)?
I am using this pattern to extract confirmation dates from a text file and converting them to a date object (see my post here Extract/convert date from string in MS Access).
The current pattern matches all strings that look like a date, but may not be the confirmation date (which is always preceded by Confirmed by), and moreover, may not have complete date information (e.g. no AM or PM).
Pattern: (\d+/\d+/\d+\s+\d+:\d+:\d+\s+\w+|\d+-\w+-\d+\s+\d+:\d+:\d+)
Sample text:
WHEN COMPARED WITH RESULT OF 7/13/12 09:06:42 NO SIGNIFICANT
CHANGE; Confirmed by SMITH, MD, JOHN (2242) on 7/14/2012 3:46:21 PM;
The above pattern matches the following:
WHEN COMPARED WITH RESULT OF 7/13/12 09:06:42 NO SIGNIFICANT
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
CHANGE; Confirmed by SMITH, MD, JOHN (2242) on 7/14/2012 3:46:21 PM;
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I want the pattern to look for the date in the segment of the text file that begins with Confirmed by and ends with a semi-colon. Also, in order to properly convert the time, the pattern should match only AM or PM at the end. How can I restrict the pattern to this segment and add the additional AM or PM criteria?
Can anyone help?
In order to match the end of the string, use $ at the end of your regex. To match the entire phrase "Confirmed by <someone> on <date>", use plain text (remember that plain text can be used in a regex as well -- if you aren't using special characters, the matcher will match your query verbatim). You need to use a negative look-ahead to exclude entire words.So maybe something like this:
Confirmed by (?!\ on\ )(\d+/\d+/\d+\s+\d+:\d+:\d+\s+\w+|\d+-\w+-\d+\s+\d+:\d+:\d+)$
Which will allow you to match a string that starts with "Confirmed by", followed by anything except for " on ", followed by the date that you capture, and the end of the string.
Edit: the negative look-ahead part is tricky, look at the answer below for more reference:
A regular expression to exclude a word/string
I don't see any need for a lookahead here, positive or negative. This works correctly on your sample string:
Confirmed by [^;]*(\d+/\d+/\d+\s+\d+:\d+:\d+(?:\s+(?:AM|PM))?|\d+-\w+-\d+\s+\d+:\d+:\d+);
The [^;]* effectively corrals the match between a Confirmed by sequence and its closing semicolon. (I'm assuming the semicolon will always be present.)
+(?:\s+(?:AM|PM))? makes the AM/PM optional, along with its leading whitespace.
The actual date will be stored in capturing group #1.
Try this:
(\d+/\d+/\d+\s+\d+:\d+:\d+\s+(?:AM|PM));
The simplest answer is more than often a good enough solution. By turning of the default greedy behavior (using the question mark: .*?) the regular expression will instead try to find the shortest match that matches the pattern. A pattern never matches the same string more than once, this means that each Confirmed by can only be coupled with one date which in this case is the next to follow.
Confirmed by.*?(\d+/\d+/\d+\s+\d+:\d+:\d+\s+(?:AM|PM));
consider following scenario
input string = "WIPR.NS"
i have to replace this with "WIPR2.NS"
i am using following logic.
match pattern = "(.*)\.NS$" \\ any string that ends with .NS
replace pattern = "$12.NS"
In above case, since there is no group with index 12, i get result $12.NS
But what i want is "WIPR2.NS".
If i don't have digit 2 to replace, it works in all other cases but not working for 2.
How to resolve this case?
Thanks in advance,
Alok
Usually depends entirely on your regex engine (I'm not familiar with those that use $1 to represent a capture group, I'm more used to \1 but you'd have the same problem with that).
Some will provide a delimiter that you can use, like:
replace pattern = "${1}2.NS"
which clearly indicates that you want capture group 1 followed by the literal 2.NS.
In fact, by looking at this page, it appears that's exactly the way to do it (assuming .NET):
To replace with the first backreference immediately followed by the digit 9, use ${1}9. If you type $19, and there are less than 19 backreferences, the $19 will be interpreted as literal text, and appear in the result string as such.
Also keep in mind that Jay provides an excellent answer for this specific use case that doesn't require capture groups at all (by just replacing .NS with 2.NS).
You may want to look into that as a possibility - I'll leave this answer here since:
it's the accepted answer; and
it probably better for the more complex cases, like changing X([A-Z])4([A-Z]) with X${1}5${2}, where you have variable text on either side of the bit you wish to modify.
You don't need to do anything with what precedes the .NS, since only what is being matched is subject to replacement.
match pattern = "\.NS$" (any string that ends with .NS -- don't forget to escape the .)
replace pattern = "2.NS"
You can further refine this with lookaround zero-width assertions, but that depends on your regex engine, and you have not specified the environment/programming language in which you are working.