I'm trying to get the list of all digits preceding a hyphen in a given string (let's say in cell A1), using a Google Sheets regex formula :
=REGEXEXTRACT(A1, "\d-")
My problem is that it only returns the first match... how can I get all matches?
Example text:
"A1-Nutrition;A2-ActPhysiq;A2-BioMeta;A2-Patho-jour;A2-StgMrktg2;H2-Bioth2/EtudeCas;H2-Bioth2/Gemmo;H2-Bioth2/Oligo;H2-Bioth2/Opo;H2-Bioth2/Organo;H3-Endocrino;H3-Génétiq"
My formula returns 1-, whereas I want to get 1-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-3-3- (either as an array or concatenated text).
I know I could use a script or another function (like SPLIT) to achieve the desired result, but what I really want to know is how I could get a re2 regular expression to return such multiple matches in a "REGEX.*" Google Sheets formula.
Something like the "global - Don't return after first match" option on regex101.com
I've also tried removing the undesired text with REGEXREPLACE, with no success either (I couldn't get rid of other digits not preceding a hyphen).
Any help appreciated!
Thanks :)
You can actually do this in a single formula using regexreplace to surround all the values with a capture group instead of replacing the text:
=join("",REGEXEXTRACT(A1,REGEXREPLACE(A1,"(\d-)","($1)")))
basically what it does is surround all instances of the \d- with a "capture group" then using regex extract, it neatly returns all the captures. if you want to join it back into a single string you can just use join to pack it back into a single cell:
You may create your own custom function in the Script Editor:
function ExtractAllRegex(input, pattern,groupId) {
return [Array.from(input.matchAll(new RegExp(pattern,'g')), x=>x[groupId])];
}
Or, if you need to return all matches in a single cell joined with some separator:
function ExtractAllRegex(input, pattern,groupId,separator) {
return Array.from(input.matchAll(new RegExp(pattern,'g')), x=>x[groupId]).join(separator);
}
Then, just call it like =ExtractAllRegex(A1, "\d-", 0, ", ").
Description:
input - current cell value
pattern - regex pattern
groupId - Capturing group ID you want to extract
separator - text used to join the matched results.
Edit
I came up with more general solution:
=regexreplace(A1,"(.)?(\d-)|(.)","$2")
It replaces any text except the second group match (\d-) with just the second group $2.
"(.)?(\d-)|(.)"
1 2 3
Groups are in ()
---------------------------------------
"$2" -- means return the group number 2
Learn regular expressions: https://regexone.com
Try this formula:
=regexreplace(regexreplace(A1,"[^\-0-9]",""),"(\d-)|(.)","$1")
It will handle string like this:
"A1-Nutrition;A2-ActPhysiq;A2-BioM---eta;A2-PH3-Généti***566*9q"
with output:
1-2-2-2-3-
I wasn't able to get the accepted answer to work for my case. I'd like to do it that way, but needed a quick solution and went with the following:
Input:
1111 days, 123 hours 1234 minutes and 121 seconds
Expected output:
1111 123 1234 121
Formula:
=split(REGEXREPLACE(C26,"[a-z,]"," ")," ")
The shortest possible regex:
=regexreplace(A1,".?(\d-)|.", "$1")
Which returns 1-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-3-3- for "A1-Nutrition;A2-ActPhysiq;A2-BioMeta;A2-Patho-jour;A2-StgMrktg2;H2-Bioth2/EtudeCas;H2-Bioth2/Gemmo;H2-Bioth2/Oligo;H2-Bioth2/Opo;H2-Bioth2/Organo;H3-Endocrino;H3-Génétiq".
Explanation of regex:
.? -- optional character
(\d-) -- capture group 1 with a digit followed by a dash (specify (\d+-) multiple digits)
| -- logical or
. -- any character
the replacement "$1" uses just the capture group 1, and discards anything else
Learn more about regex: https://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/TWikiPresentation2018x10x14Regex
This seems to work and I have tried to verify it.
The logic is
(1) Replace letter followed by hyphen with nothing
(2) Replace any digit not followed by a hyphen with nothing
(3) Replace everything which is not a digit or hyphen with nothing
=regexreplace(A1,"[a-zA-Z]-|[0-9][^-]|[a-zA-Z;/é]","")
Result
1-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-3-3-
Analysis
I had to step through these procedurally to convince myself that this was correct. According to this reference when there are alternatives separated by the pipe symbol, regex should match them in order left-to-right. The above formula doesn't work properly unless rule 1 comes first (otherwise it reduces all characters except a digit or hyphen to null before rule (1) can come into play and you get an extra hyphen from "Patho-jour").
Here are some examples of how I think it must deal with the text
The solution to capture groups with RegexReplace and then do the RegexExctract works here too, but there is a catch.
=join("",REGEXEXTRACT(A1,REGEXREPLACE(A1,"(\d-)","($1)")))
If the cell that you are trying to get the values has Special Characters like parentheses "(" or question mark "?" the solution provided won´t work.
In my case, I was trying to list all “variables text” contained in the cell. Those “variables text “ was wrote inside like that: “{example_name}”. But the full content of the cell had special characters making the regex formula do break. When I removed theses specials characters, then I could list all captured groups like the solution did.
There are two general ('Excel' / 'native' / non-Apps Script) solutions to return an array of regex matches in the style of REGEXEXTRACT:
Method 1)
insert a delimiter around matches, remove junk, and call SPLIT
Regexes work by iterating over the string from left to right, and 'consuming'. If we are careful to consume junk values, we can throw them away.
(This gets around the problem faced by the currently accepted solution, which is that as Carlos Eduardo Oliveira mentions, it will obviously fail if the corpus text contains special regex characters.)
First we pick a delimiter, which must not already exist in the text. The proper way to do this is to parse the text to temporarily replace our delimiter with a "temporary delimiter", like if we were going to use commas "," we'd first replace all existing commas with something like "<<QUOTED-COMMA>>" then un-replace them later. BUT, for simplicity's sake, we'll just grab a random character such as from the private-use unicode blocks and use it as our special delimiter (note that it is 2 bytes... google spreadsheets might not count bytes in graphemes in a consistent way, but we'll be careful later).
=SPLIT(
LAMBDA(temp,
MID(temp, 1, LEN(temp)-LEN(""))
)(
REGEXREPLACE(
"xyzSixSpaces:[ ]123ThreeSpaces:[ ]aaaa 12345",".*?( |$)",
"$1"
)
),
""
)
We just use a lambda to define temp="match1match2match3", then use that to remove the last delimiter into "match1match2match3", then SPLIT it.
Taking COLUMNS of the result will prove that the correct result is returned, i.e. {" ", " ", " "}.
This is a particularly good function to turn into a Named Function, and call it something like REGEXGLOBALEXTRACT(text,regex) or REGEXALLEXTRACT(text,regex), e.g.:
=SPLIT(
LAMBDA(temp,
MID(temp, 1, LEN(temp)-LEN(""))
)(
REGEXREPLACE(
text,
".*?("®ex&"|$)",
"$1"
)
),
""
)
Method 2)
use recursion
With LAMBDA (i.e. lets you define a function like any other programming language), you can use some tricks from the well-studied lambda calculus and function programming: you have access to recursion. Defining a recursive function is confusing because there's no easy way for it to refer to itself, so you have to use a trick/convention:
trick for recursive functions: to actually define a function f which needs to refer to itself, instead define a function that takes a parameter of itself and returns the function you actually want; pass in this 'convention' to the Y-combinator to turn it into an actual recursive function
The plumbing which takes such a function work is called the Y-combinator. Here is a good article to understand it if you have some programming background.
For example to get the result of 5! (5 factorial, i.e. implement our own FACT(5)), we could define:
Named Function Y(f)=LAMBDA(f, (LAMBDA(x,x(x)))( LAMBDA(x, f(LAMBDA(y, x(x)(y)))) ) ) (this is the Y-combinator and is magic; you don't have to understand it to use it)
Named Function MY_FACTORIAL(n)=
Y(LAMBDA(self,
LAMBDA(n,
IF(n=0, 1, n*self(n-1))
)
))
result of MY_FACTORIAL(5): 120
The Y-combinator makes writing recursive functions look relatively easy, like an introduction to programming class. I'm using Named Functions for clarity, but you could just dump it all together at the expense of sanity...
=LAMBDA(Y,
Y(LAMBDA(self, LAMBDA(n, IF(n=0,1,n*self(n-1))) ))(5)
)(
LAMBDA(f, (LAMBDA(x,x(x)))( LAMBDA(x, f(LAMBDA(y, x(x)(y)))) ) )
)
How does this apply to the problem at hand? Well a recursive solution is as follows:
in pseudocode below, I use 'function' instead of LAMBDA, but it's the same thing:
// code to get around the fact that you can't have 0-length arrays
function emptyList() {
return {"ignore this value"}
}
function listToArray(myList) {
return OFFSET(myList,0,1)
}
function allMatches(text, regex) {
allMatchesHelper(emptyList(), text, regex)
}
function allMatchesHelper(resultsToReturn, text, regex) {
currentMatch = REGEXEXTRACT(...)
if (currentMatch succeeds) {
textWithoutMatch = SUBSTITUTE(text, currentMatch, "", 1)
return allMatches(
{resultsToReturn,currentMatch},
textWithoutMatch,
regex
)
} else {
return listToArray(resultsToReturn)
}
}
Unfortunately, the recursive approach is quadratic order of growth (because it's appending the results over and over to itself, while recreating the giant search string with smaller and smaller bites taken out of it, so 1+2+3+4+5+... = big^2, which can add up to a lot of time), so may be slow if you have many many matches. It's better to stay inside the regex engine for speed, since it's probably highly optimized.
You could of course avoid using Named Functions by doing temporary bindings with LAMBDA(varName, expr)(varValue) if you want to use varName in an expression. (You can define this pattern as a Named Function =cont(varValue) to invert the order of the parameters to keep code cleaner, or not.)
Whenever I use varName = varValue, write that instead.
to see if a match succeeds, use ISNA(...)
It would look something like:
Named Function allMatches(resultsToReturn, text, regex):
UNTESTED:
LAMBDA(helper,
OFFSET(
helper({"ignore"}, text, regex),
0,1)
)(
Y(LAMBDA(helperItself,
LAMBDA(results, partialText,
LAMBDA(currentMatch,
IF(ISNA(currentMatch),
results,
LAMBDA(textWithoutMatch,
helperItself({results,currentMatch}, textWithoutMatch)
)(
SUBSTITUTE(partialText, currentMatch, "", 1)
)
)
)(
REGEXEXTRACT(partialText, regex)
)
)
))
)
I need to sort a table field with different kind of values:
number from 0 to 999+
group of three letters like AAA, AAB, AAC, AAD, etc.
StupidTable.js enables me to add a custom alphanumeric data type, but i'm not able to define the regex pattern.
I tried this code:
$("table").stupidtable({
"alphanum":function(a,b){
console.log(a,b)
var pattern = "^[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]*$";
var re = new RegExp(pattern);
var aNum = re.exec(a).slice(1);
var bNum = re.exec(b).slice(1);
return parseInt(aNum,10) - parseInt(bNum,10);
}
})
but it doesnt work. You can check the issue on this page clicking on "nr" tab: Test
Try something like this:
const regexPattern = /^[\d\w]{3}/gm;
This pattern allows you to capture a string if it contains only a 3 digit number or a 3 letter code. If you want to capture 0 and not 000, you will need to change {3} with {1,3}, but this will also capture A instead of AAA.
You might also consider normalizing your data in some ways, e.g. converting A to AAA and 0 to 000. This could be helpful for a number of reasons assuming your variable type is a string and not actually a number type. Does that make sense?
You can see how I've created this pattern at the link below, and try some tweaks to make it work well for you. I use this tool a lot and it will also generate some code for you in different languages. Good luck with your project, let me know how it goes.
Regex101.com
I have a text in cell (A1) like this:
✌😋👅👅☝️😉🍌🍪💧💧
I want to extract the unique emojis from this cell into separate cells:
✌😋👅☝️😉🍌🍪💧
Is this possible?
You want to put each character of ✌😋👅👅☝️😉🍌🍪💧💧 to each cell by splitting using the built-in function of Google Spreadsheet.
Sample formula:
=SPLIT(REGEXREPLACE(A1,"(.)","$1#"),"#")
✌😋👅👅☝️😉🍌🍪💧💧 is put in a cell "A1".
Using REGEXREPLACE, # is put to between each character like ✌#😋#👅#👅#☝#️#😉#🍌#🍪#💧#💧#.
Using SPLIT, the value is splitted with #.
Result:
Note:
In your question, the value of ️ which cannot be displayed is included. It's \ufe0f. So "G1" can be seen like no value. But the value is existing. So please be careful this. If you want to remove the value, you can use ✌😋👅👅☝😉🍌🍪💧💧.
References:
REGEXREPLACE
SPLIT
Added:
From marikamitsos's comment, I could notice that my understanding was not correct. So the final result is as follows. This is from marikamitsos.
=TRANSPOSE(UNIQUE(TRANSPOSE(SPLIT(REGEXREPLACE(A1,"(.)","$1#"),"#"))))
or try:
=TRANSPOSE(UNIQUE(TRANSPOSE(REGEXEXTRACT(A1, REPT("(.)", LEN(A1))))))
Formula
Appears, one of the best formula solutions would be:
=SPLIT(REGEXREPLACE(A1,"(.)","$1#"),"#")
You may also add some additional checks like skin tones & intermediate chars:
=TRANSPOSE(SPLIT(REGEXREPLACE(A2,"(.[🏻🏼🏽🏾🏿"&CHAR(8205)&CHAR(65039)&"]*)","#$1"),"#"))
It will help to join some emojis as a single emoji.
Script
More precise way is to use the script:
https://github.com/orling/grapheme-splitter/blob/master/index.js
↑
Add the code to Script editor
Add code for sample usage:
function splitEmojis(string) {
var splitter = new GraphemeSplitter();
// split the string to an array of grapheme clusters (one string each)
var graphemes = splitter.splitGraphemes(string);
return graphemes;
}
Tests
Not 100% precise
1
Please note: some emojis are not correctly shown in sheets
🏴🏴🏴🏴
↑ emojis:
flag: England
flag: Scotland
flag: Wales
black flag
are the same for Google Sheets.
2
Vlookup function in #GoogleSheets and in #Excel thinks chars
#️⃣ and
*️⃣
are the same!
This is my sample data (attributes) to match with:
[87027^适用年龄#619081^12-36个月,108389^国产/进口#619192^国产,108376^包装单位#619113^盒装,12210^分类#121491^牛奶粉,108385^奶源产地#619164^澳洲/新西兰,115919^配方#651827^常规配方奶粉,12212^段位#121499^3段,108380^净含量#619152^2kg以上]
[108385^奶源产地#619183^其它 ,12212^段位#121499^3段,87027^适用年龄#619081^12-36个月,108376^包装单位#619120^桶装,108389^国产/进口#619196^进口,12210^分类#121491^牛奶粉,115919^配方#651827^常规配方奶粉,12241^价格#121803^200-299元,108380^净含量#619147^800-1000g]
[87027^适用年龄#619081^12-36个月,108389^国产/进口#619192^国产,108376^包装单位#619113^盒装,12210^分类#121491^牛奶粉,108385^奶源产地#619164^澳洲/新西兰,115919^配方#651827^常规配方奶粉,12212^段位#121499^3段,108380^净含量#619152^2kg以上]
So I'm trying to match with all the values in between the numbers. So for the first data line, I would want to match with the value between 87027 and 619081, and the value between 619081 and 108389 and so on for every value.
Here is my code so far:
data = LOAD 'SHORT.txt' USING PigStorage() AS (number:chararray, user:chararray, item:chararray, attributes:chararray);
B = FOREACH data GENERATE REGEX_EXTRACT_ALL (attributes, '\\^(.*?)[#|,|\\]]');
DUMP B;
Please let me know if you there is any other information needed. Thanks!
This pattern captures what you describe:
\d+?(\^.+?[,#\]])
Example here: https://regex101.com/r/pOPWwY/2
Looks like Hadoop needs double-escaping of backslashes, so bear that in mind when testing the above.
If want to exclude the markers , # ], then:
\d+?(\^.+?)[,#\]]
I'm trying to write a formula for Google Sheets which will convert Unicode characters with diacritics to their plain ASCII equivalents.
I see that Google uses RE2 in its "REGEXREPLACE" function. And I see that RE2 offers Unicode character classes.
I tried to write a formula (similar to this one):
REGEXREPLACE("público","(\pL)\pM*","$1")
But Sheets produces the following error:
Function REGEXREPLACE parameter 2 value "\pL" is not a valid regular expression.
I suppose I could write a formula consisting of a long set of nested SUBSTITUTE functions (Like this one), but that seems pretty awful.
Can any offer a suggestion for a better way to normalize Unicode letters with diacritical/accent marks in a Google Sheets formula?
[[:^alpha:]] (negated ASCII character class) works fine for REGEXEXTRACT formula.
But =REGEXREPLACE("público","([[:alpha:]])[[:^alpha:]]","$1") gives "pblic" as a result. So, I guess, formula doesn't know what exact ASCII character must replace "ú".
Workaround
Let's take the word públicē; we need to replace two symbols in it. Put this word in cell A1, and this formula in cell B1:
=JOIN("",ArrayFormula(IFERROR(VLOOKUP(SPLIT(REGEXREPLACE(A1,"(.)","$1-"),"-"),D:E,2,0),SPLIT(REGEXREPLACE(A1,"(.)","$1-"),"-"))))
And then make directory of replacements in range D:E:
D E
1 ú u
2 ē e
3 ... ...
This formula is still ugly, but more useful because you can control your directory by adding more characters to the table.
Or use Java Script
Also found a good solution, which works in google sheets.
This did it for me in Google Sheets, Google Apps Scripts, GAS
function normalizetext(text) {
var weird = 'öüóőúéáàűíÖÜÓŐÚÉÁÀŰÍçÇ!#£$%^&*()_+?/*."';
var normalized = 'ouooueaauiOUOOUEAAUIcC ';
var idoff = -1,new_text = '';
var lentext = text.toString().length -1
for (i = 0; i <= lentext; i++) {
idoff = weird.search(text.charAt(i));
if (idoff == -1) {
new_text = new_text + text.charAt(i);
} else {
new_text = new_text + normalized.charAt(idoff);
}
}
return new_text;
}
This answer doesn't require a Google App Script, and it's still fast, and relatively simple. It builds on Max's answer by providing a full lookup table, and it also allows for case-sensitive transliteration (normally VLOOKUP is NOT case-sensitive).
Here is a link to the Google Spreadsheet if you want to jump right into it. If you want to use your own sheet, you'll need to copy the TRANS_TABLE sheet into your Spreadsheet.
In the code snippet below, the source cell is A2, so you'd place this formula in any column on row 2. Using REGEXREPLACE AND SPLIT, we split apart the string in A2 into an array of characters, then USING ARRAYFORMULA, we do the following to EACH character in the array: First, the character is converted to its 'decimal' CODE equivalent, then matched against a table on the TRANS_TABLE sheet by that number, then using VLOOKUP, a character X number of columns over (the index value provided) on the TRANS_TABLE sheet (in this case, the 3rd column over) is returned. When all characters in the array have been transliterated, we finally JOIN the array of characters back into a single string. I provided examples with named ranges as well.
=iferror(
join(
"",
ARRAYFORMULA(
vlookup(
code(split(REGEXREPLACE($A2,"(.)", "$1;"),";",TRUE)),
TRANS_TABLE!$A$5:$F,3
)
)
)
,)
You'll note on the TRANS_TABLE sheet I made, I created 4 different transliteration columns, which makes it easy to have a column for each of your transliteration needs. To reference the column, just use a different index number in the VLOOKUP. Each column is simply a replacement character column. In some cases, you don't want any conversion made (A -> A or 3 -> 3), so you just copy the same character from the source Glyph column. Where you DO want to convert characters, you type in whatever character you want replaced (ñ -> n etc). If you want a character removed altogether, you leave the cell blank (? -> ''). You can see examples of the transliteration output on the data sheet in which I created 4 different transliteration columns (A-D) referencing each of the Transliteration tables from the TRANS_TABLE sheet for different use case scenarios.
I hope this finally answers your question in a fashion that isn't so "ugly." Cheers.