Sample input:
___file___name___2000___ed2___1___2___3
DIFFERENT+FILENAME+(2000)+1+2+3+ed10
Desired output (eg, all letters and 4-digit numbers and literal 'ed' followed immediately by a digit of arbitrary length:
file name 2000 ed2
DIFFERENT FILENAME 2000 ed10
I am using:
[A-Za-z]+|[\d]{4}|ed\d+ which only returns:
file name 2000 ed
DIFFERENT FILENAME 2000 ed
I see that there is a related Q+A here:Regular Expression to match specific string followed by number?
eg using ed[0-9]* would match ed#, but unsure why it does not match in the above.
As written, your regex is correct. Remember, however, that regex tries to match its statements from left to right. Your ed\d+ is never going to match, because the ed was already consumed by your [A-Za-z] alternative. Reorder your regex and it'll work just fine:
ed\d+|[a-zA-Z]+|\d{4}
Demo
Nick's answer is right, but because in-order matching can be a less readable "gotcha", the best (order-insensitive) ways to do this kind of search are 1) with specified delimiters, and 2) by making each search term unique.
Jan's answer handles #1 well. But you would have to specify each specific delimiter, including its length (e.g. ___). It sounds like you may have some unusual delimiters, so this may not be ideal.
For #2, then, you can make each search term unique. (That is, you want the thing matching "file" and "name" to be distinct from the thing matching "2000", and both to be distinct from the thing matching "ed2".)
One way to do this is [A-Za-z]+(?![0-9a-zA-Z])|[\d]{4}|ed\d+. This is saying that for the first type of search term, you want an alphabet string which is followed by a non-alphanumeric character. This keeps it distinct from the third search term, which is an alphabet string followed by some digit(s). This also allows you to specify any range of delimiters inside of that negative lookbehind.
demo
You might very well use (just grab the first capturing group):
(?:^|___|[+(]) # delimiter before
([a-zA-Z0-9]{2,}) # the actual content
(?=$|___|[+)]) # delimiter afterwards
See a demo on regex101.com
Related
I have data like this:
~10~682423~15~Test Data~10~68276127~15~More Data~10~6813~15~Also Data~
I'm trying to use Notepad++ to find and replace the values within tag 10 (682423, 68276127, 6813) with zeroes. I thought the syntax below would work, but it selects the first occurrence of the text I want and the rest of the line, instead of just the text I want (~10~682423~, for example). I also tried dozens of variations from searching online, but they also either did the same thing or wouldn't return any results.
~10~.*~
You can use: (?<=~10~)\d+(?=~) and replace with 0. This uses lookarounds to check that ~10~ precedes the digit sequence and the (?=~) ensures a ~ follows the digit sequence. If any character could be after the ~10~ field, use (?<=~10~)[^~]+(?=~).
The problem with ~10~.*~ is that the * is greedy, so it just slurps away matching any character and ~.
Use
\b10~\d+
Replace with 10~0. See proof. \b10~ will capture 10 as entire number (no match in 210 is allowed) and \d+ will match one or more digits.
I'm trying to use prxmatch to verify if postcode format (UK) is correct. The ('/^[A-Z]{1,2}\d{2,3}[A-Z]{2}|[A-Z]{1,2}\d[A-Z]\d[A-Z]{2}$/') bit covers (I think) all the possible post code formats used in UK, however I only want exact and not partial matches and no additional chars before or after match.
data pc_flag ; set abc ;
format pc_correct_flag $1. compressed_postcode $100.;
compressed_postcode = compress(postcode);
pc_regex = prxparse('/^[A-Z]{1,2}\d{2,3}[A-Z]{2}|[A-Z]{1,2}\d[A-Z]\d[A-Z]{2}$/');
if prxmatch(pc_regex,compressed_postcode)>0
then pc_correct_flag='Y';
else pc_correct_flag='N';run;
I was expecting 'Y' only on exact matches on full string, i.e. with no additional characters before and after regex. However, I'm also getting false positives, where a part of 'compressed_postcode' matches regex, but there are additional characters after the match, which I thought using $ would prevent.
I.e. I'd expect only something like AA11AA to match, but not AA11AAAA. I suspect this has to do with $ positioning but can't figure out exactly what's wrong. Any idea what I've missed?
SAS character variables contain trailing spaces out to the length of the variable. Either trim the value to be examined, or add \s*$ as the pattern termination.
if prxmatch(pc_regex,TRIM(compressed_postcode))>0 then …
Your regex is quite permissive - it allows every letter of the alphabet in every valid character position, so it matches quite a lot of strings that look like valid postcodes but do not exist as such, e.g. ZZ1 1ZZ.
I provided a more specific SAS-compatible postcode regex as an answer to another question - here's link in case this proves useful to you:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/43793562/667489
That one still matches some non-postcode strings, but it filters out any with characters on Royal Mail's blacklists for each position within the postcode.
As per Richard's answer, you need to trim the string being matched before applying the regex, or amend the regex to match extra trailing blanks.
I am trying to write a regex that matches only strings like this:
89-72
10-123
109-12
122-311(a)
22-311(a)(1)(d)(4)
These strings are embedded in sentences and sometimes there are 2 potential matches in the sentence like this:
In section 10-123 which references section 122-311(a) there is a phone number 456-234-2222
I do not want to match the phone. Here is my current working regex
\d{2,3}\-\d{2,3}(\([a-zA-Z0-9]\))*
see DEMO
I've been looking on Stack and have not found anything yet. Any help would be appreciated. Will be using this in a google sheet and potentially postgres.
Based on regex, suggested by #Wiktor Stribiżew:
=REGEXEXTRACT(A1,REPT("\b(\d{2,3}-\d{2,3}\b(?:\([A-Za-z0-9]\))*)(?:[^-]|$)(?:.*)",LEN(REGEXREPLACE(REGEXREPLACE(A1,"\b(\d{2,3}-\d{2,3}\b(?:\([A-Za-z0-9]\))*)(?:[^-]|$)", char (9)),"[^"&char(9)&"]",""))))
The formula will return all matches.
String:
A
In 22-311(a)(1)(d)(4) section 10-123 which ... 122-311(a) ... number 456-234-2222
Output:
B C D
22-311(a)(1)(d)(4) 10-123 122-311(a)
Solution
To extract all matches from a string, use this pattern:
=REGEXEXTRACT(A1,
REPT(basic_regex & "(?:.*)",
LEN(REGEXREPLACE(REGEXREPLACE(A1,basic_regex, char (9)),"[^"&char(9)&"]",""))))
The tail of a function:
LEN(REGEXREPLACE(REGEXREPLACE(A1,basic_regex, char (9)),"[^"&char(9)&"]","")))
is just for finding number 3 -- how many entries of a pattern in a string.
To not match the phone number you have to indicate that the match must neither be preceded nor followed by \d or -. Google spreadsheet uses RE2 which does not support look around assertion (see the list of supported feature) so as far as I can tell, the only solution is to add a character before and after the match, or the string boundary:
(?:^|[^-\d])\d{2,3}\-\d{2,3}(\([a-zA-Z0-9]\))*(?:$|[^-\d])
(?:^|[^-\d]) means either the start of a line (^) or a character that is not - or \d (you might want to change that, and forbid all letters as well). $ is the end of a line. ^ and $ only do what you want with the /m flag though
As you can see here this finds the correct strings, but with additional spaces around some of the matches.
I am working with government measures and am required to parse a string that contains variable information based on delimiters that come from issuing bodies associated with the fda.
I am trying to retrieve the delimiter and the value after the delimiter. I have searched for hours to find a regex solution to retrieve both the delimiter and the value that follows it and, though there seems to be posts that handle this, the code found in the post haven't worked.
One of the major issues in this task is that the delimiters often have repeated characters. For instance: delimiters are used such as "=", "=,", "/=". In this case I would need to tell the difference between "=" and "=,".
Is there a regex that would handle all of this?
Here is an example of the string :
=/A9999XYZ=>100T0479&,1Blah
Notice the delimiters are:
"=/"
"=>'
"&,1"
Any help would be appreciated.
You can use a regex like this
(=/|=>|&,1)|(\w+)
Working demo
The idea is that the first group contains the delimiters and the 2nd group the content. I assume the content can be word characters (a to z and digits with underscore). You have then to grab the content of every capturing group.
You need to capture both the delimiter and the value as group 1 and 2 respectively.
If your values are all alphanumeric, use this:
(&,1|\W+)(\w+)
See live demo.
If your values can contain non-alphanumeric characters, it get complicated:
(=/|=>|=,|=|&,1)((?:.(?!=/|=>|=,|=|&,1))+.)
See live demo.
Code the delimiters longest first, eg "=," before "=", otherwise the alternation, which matches left to right, will match "=" and the comma will become part of the value.
This uses a negative look ahead to stop matching past the next delimiter.
I want to remove all numbers from a paragraph except from some words.
My attempt is using a negative look-ahead:
gsub('(?!ami.12.0|allo.12)[[:digit:]]+','',
c('0.12','1245','ami.12.0 00','allo.12 1'),perl=TRUE)
But this doesn't work. I get this:
"." "" "ami.. " "allo."
Or my expected output is:
"." "" 'ami.12.0','allo.12'
You can't really use a negative lookahead here, since it will still replace when the cursor is at some point after ami.
What you can do is put back some matches:
(ami.12.0|allo.12)|[[:digit:]]+
gsub('(ami.12.0|allo.12)|[[:digit:]]+',"\\1",
c('0.12','1245','ami.12.0 00','allo.12 1'),perl=TRUE)
I kept the . since I'm not 100% sure what you have, but keep in mind that . is a wildcard and will match any character (except newlines) unless you escape it.
Your regex is actually finding every digit sequence that is not the start of "ami.12.0" or "allo.12". So for example, in your third string, it gets to the 12 in ami.12.0 and looks ahead to see if that 12 is the start of either of the two ignored strings. It is not, so it continues with replacing it. It would be best to generalize this, but in your specific case, you can probably achieve this by instead doing a negative lookbehind for any prefixes of the words (that can be followed by digit sequences) that you want to skip. So, you would use something like this:
gsub('(?<!ami\\.|ami\\.12\\.|allo\\.)[[:digit:]]+','',
c('0.12','1245','ami.12.0 00','allo.12 1'),perl=TRUE)