Can we create a regular expression that matches every founder in this list? - regex

Question

User #adventured posted this on Hacker News:
Paul Graham (31, Viaweb); Jan Koum (33, WhatsApp); Brian Acton (37, WhatsApp); Ev Williams (34, Twitter); Jack Dorsey (33, Square); Elon Musk (32, Tesla | 31, SpaceX | 27, PayPal); Garrett Camp (30, Uber); Travis Kalanick (32, Uber); Brian Chesky (27, Airbnb); Adam Neumann (31, WeWork); Reed Hastings (37, Netflix); Reid Hoffman (36, LinkedIn); Jack Ma (35, Alibaba); Jeff Bezos (30, Amazon); Jerry Sanders (33, AMD); Marc Benioff (35, Salesforce); Ross Perot (32, EDS); Peter Norton (39, Norton); Larry Ellison (33, Oracle); Mitch Kapor (32, Lotus); Leonard Bosack (32, Cisco); Sandy Lerner (29, Cisco); Gordon Moore (39, Intel); Mark Cuban (37, Broadcast.com); Scott Cook (31, Intuit); Nolan Bushnell (29, Atari); Paul Galvin (33, Motorola); Irwin Jacobs (52, Qualcomm); David Duffield (46, PeopleSoft | 64, Workday); Aneel Bhusri (39, Workday); Thomas Siebel (41, Siebel Systems); John McAfee (42, McAfee); Gary Hendrix (32, Symantec); Scott McNealy (28, Sun); Pierre Omidyar (28, eBay); Rich Barton (29, Expedia | 38, Zillow); Jim Clark (38, SGI | 49, Netscape); Charles Wang (32, CA); David Packard (27, HP); Craig Newmark (43, Craigslist); John Warnock (42, Adobe); Robert Noyce (30, Fairchild | 41, Intel); Rod Canion (37, Compaq); Jen-Hsun Huang (30, nVidia); James Goodnight (33, SAS); John Sall (28, SAS); Eli Harari (41, SanDisk); Sanjay Mehrotra (28, SanDisk); Al Shugart (48, Seagate); Finis Conner (34, Seagate); Henry Samueli (37, Broadcom); Henry Nicholas (32, Broadcom); Charles Brewer (36, Mindspring); William Shockley (45, Shockley); Ron Rivest (35, RSA); Adi Shamir (30, RSA); John Walker (32, Autodesk); Halsey Minor (30, CNet); David Filo (28, Yahoo); Jeremy Stoppelman (27, Yelp); Eric Lefkofsky (39, Groupon); Andrew Mason (29, Groupon); Markus Persson (30, Mojang); David Hitz (28, NetApp); Brian Lee (28, Legalzoom); Demis Hassabis (34, DeepMind); Tim Westergren (35, Pandora); Martin Lorentzon (37, Spotify); Ashar Aziz (44, FireEye); Kevin O'Connor (36, DoubleClick); Ben Silbermann (28, Pinterest); Evan Sharp (28, Pinterest); Steve Kirsch (38, Infoseek); Stephen Kaufer (36, TripAdvisor); Michael McNeilly (28, Applied Materials); Eugene McDermott (52, Texas Instruments); Richard Egan (43, EMC); Gary Kildall (32, Digital Research); Hasso Plattner (28, SAP); Robert Glaser (32, Real Networks); Patrick Byrne (37, Overstock.com); Marc Lore (33, Diapers.com); Ed Iacobucci (36, Citrix Systems); Ray Noorda (55, Novell); Tom Leighton (42, Akamai); Daniel Lewin (28, Akamai); Diane Greene (43, VMWare); Mendel Rosenblum (36, VMWare); Michael Mauldin (35, Lycos); Tom Anderson (33, MySpace); Chris DeWolfe (37, MySpace); Mark Pincus (41, Zynga); Caterina Fake (34, Flickr); Stewart Butterfield (31, Flickr | 36, Slack); Kevin Systrom (27, Instagram); Adi Tatarko (37, Houzz); Brian Armstrong (29, Coinbase); Pradeep Sindhu (43, Juniper); Peter Thiel (31, PayPal | 37, Palantir); Jay Walker (42, Priceline.com); Bill Coleman (48, BEA Systems); Evan Goldberg (35, NetSuite); Fred Luddy (48, ServiceNow); Michael Baum (41, Splunk); Nir Zuk (33, Palo Alto Networks); David Sacks (36, Yammer); Jack Smith (28, Hotmail); Sabeer Bhatia (28, Hotmail); Chad Hurley (28, YouTube); Andy Rubin (37, Danger | 41, Android); Rodney Brooks (36, iRobot); Jeff Hawkins (35, Palm); Tom Gosner (39, DocuSign); Niklas Zennström (37, Skype); Janus Friis (27, Skype); George Kurtz (40, CrowdStrike); Trip Hawkins (28, EA); Gabe Newell (33, Valve); David Bohnett (38, Geocities); Bill Gross (40, GoTo.com/Overture); Subrah Iyar (38, WebEx); Eric Yuan (41, Zoom); Min Zhu (47, WebEx); Bob Parsons (47, GoDaddy); Wilfred Corrigan (43, LSI); Joe Parkinson (33, Micron); Aart J. de Geus (32, Synopsys); Patrick Byrne (37, Overstock); Matthew Prince (34, Cloudflare); Ben Uretsky (28, DigitalOcean); Tom Preston-Werner (28, GitHub); Louis Borders (48, Webvan); John Moores (36, BMC Software); Vivek Ranadivé (40, Tibco); Pony Ma (27, Tencent); Robin Li (32, Baidu); Liu Qiangdong (29, JD.com); Lei Jun (40, Xiaomi); Ren Zhengfei (38, Huawei); Arkady Volozh (36, Yandex); Hiroshi Mikitani (34, Rakuten); Morris Chang (56, Taiwan Semi); Cheng Wei (29, Didi Chuxing); James Liang (29, Ctrip); Zhang Yiming (29, ByteDance);
I tried to write a Regex that would have each "Match group" correspond to these founders. I was able to get 136/144 of the entries, but I'm kind of confused on how to capture the founders with the pipe entries (Elon Musk, David Duffield, Rich Barton, Robert Noyce, etc. Here is an example:
Elon Musk (32, Tesla | 31, SpaceX | 27, PayPal);
I know I can escape the pipes with \| but even wrapping the "paren part" with an * doesn't seem to do it.
Here's the regular expression I created:
([A-Za-zé'.\/\s+-]+{2})\s+\(([0-9]+),\s+([A-Za-z0-9\s+.-\|]+\s?)\);
(I removed the last semi-colon so that I could perform my matches after just running a split(";") on the file contents.
I created a simple repro which is here: https://github.com/arthurcolle/founders
Here's the code inline, in case you don't want to just go to the very simple repro:
rgx = /([A-Za-zé'.\/\s+-]+{2})\s+\(([0-9]+),\s+([A-Za-z0-9\s+.-\|]+\s?)\)/
FOUNDERS_FILE = "/Users/stochastic-thread/founders/founders.txt"
file = File.read(FOUNDERS_FILE)
items = file.split(";")
items.each {|item|
matched = rgx.match(item)
if matched and matched.size == 4
group = "#{matched[1]},#{matched[2]},#{matched[3]}\n"
puts group
File.open("founders.csv", mode: "a") do |f|
f.write(group)
end
end
}
What is the regular expression that would match on every "founder-company" group, taking into account the fact that every single founder might have multiple founded companies, with corresponding ages (in the specific format detailed above in the case of Elon Musk? (The ö character is unicode, so I don't think I'm able to actually match on it because when I put it in the name match group, it said multi-byte characters don't work.)
I know that I can just find entries that don't match the regex, and use a different regex that only matches the parenthesis format, or even just split again on the pipes, but I'm trying to find a "perfect regex" for this.

Answer 1

The question only asks for the founders to be matched, so initially I have not included their enterprises. Later, however, I will discuss a possible way to organize all the information.
Use String#scan with the following regular expression, which I've defined in free-spacing mode to make it self-documenting.
r = /
(?<=\A|;\s) # match the beginning of the string or a semi-colon
# followed by a whitespace char in a positive lookbehind
[\p{L} ]+ # match one or more Unicode letters or spaces
(?=\s\() # match a whitespace followed by "(" in a positive lookahead
/x # free-spacing regex definition mode
str = "Paul Graham (31, Viaweb); Jan Koum (33, WhatsApp); Brian Acton (37, WhatsApp); " +
"Elon Musk (32, Tesla | 31, SpaceX | 27, PayPal); Garrett Camp (30, Uber); " +
"Travis Kalanick (32, Uber);"
str.scan(r)
#=> ["Paul Graham", "Jan Koum", "Brian Acton", "Elon Musk", "Garrett Camp",
# "Travis Kalanick"]
This regular expression is conventionally written as follows.
/(?<=\A|; )[\p{L} ]+(?= \()/
If additional information is needed it may be desirable to create a hash such as the following.
r = /
(?<=\A|;\s) # match the beginning of the string or a semi-colon
# followed by a whitespace char in a positive lookbehind
[\p{L} ]+ # match one or more Unicode letters or spaces
\([^)]+ # match a "(" followed by > 0 characters other than ")"
/x
h = str.scan(r).
map { |s| s.split(/ \(/) }.
each_with_object({}) do |(name, startups),h|
h[name] = startups.split(/ *\| */).map do |s|
age, co = s.split(/, +/)
{ age: age.to_i, co: co }
end
end
#=> {"Paul Graham" =>[{:age=>31, :co=>"Viaweb"}],
# "Jan Koum" =>[{:age=>33, :co=>"WhatsApp"}],
# "Brian Acton" =>[{:age=>37, :co=>"WhatsApp"}],
# "Elon Musk" =>[{:age=>32, :co=>"Tesla"}, {:age=>31, :co=>"SpaceX"},
# {:age=>27, :co=>"PayPal"}],
# "Garrett Camp" =>[{:age=>30, :co=>"Uber"}],
# "Travis Kalanick"=>[{:age=>32, :co=>"Uber"}]}
One could then easily compute, for example,
h.each_with_object(Hash.new { |h,k| h[k] = [] }) do |(name, cos),g|
cos.each { |co| g[co[:co]] << name }
end
#=> {"Viaweb"=>["Paul Graham"],
# "WhatsApp"=>["Jan Koum", "Brian Acton"],
# "Tesla"=>["Elon Musk"],
# "SpaceX"=>["Elon Musk"],
# "PayPal"=>["Elon Musk"],
# "Uber"=>["Garrett Camp", "Travis Kalanick"]}
The regular expression used here is conventionally written:
/(?<=\A|; )[\p{L} ]+\([^\)]+/
The steps to compute h are as follows.
a = str.scan(r)
#=> ["Paul Graham (31, Viaweb", "Jan Koum (33, WhatsApp", "Brian Acton (37, WhatsApp",
# "Elon Musk (32, Tesla | 31, SpaceX | 27, PayPal", "Garrett Camp (30, Uber",
# "Travis Kalanick (32, Uber"]
b = a.map { |s| s.split(/ \(/) }
#=> [["Paul Graham", "31, Viaweb"], ["Jan Koum", "33, WhatsApp"],
# ["Brian Acton", "37, WhatsApp"],
# ["Elon Musk", "32, Tesla | 31, SpaceX | 27, PayPal"],
# ["Garrett Camp", "30, Uber"], ["Travis Kalanick", "32, Uber"]]
h = b.each_with_object({}) do |(name, startups),h|
h[name] = startups.split(/ *\| */).map do |s|
age, co = s.split(/, +/)
{ age: age.to_i, co: co }
end
end
#=> <as above>
In computing h from b, when
name = "Elon Musk"
startups = "32, Tesla | 31, SpaceX | 27, PayPal"
h = {"Paul Graham" =>[{:age=>31, :co=>"Viaweb"}],
"Jan Koum" =>[{:age=>33, :co=>"WhatsApp"}],
"Brian Acton" =>[{:age=>37, :co=>"WhatsApp"}]}
the block calculation is as follows.
c = startups.split(/ *\| */)
#=> ["32, Tesla", "31, SpaceX", "27, PayPal"]
d = c.map do |s|
age, co = s.split(/, +/)
{ age: age.to_i, co: co }
end
#=> [{:age=>32, :co=>"Tesla"}, {:age=>31, :co=>"SpaceX"},
# {:age=>27, :co=>"PayPal"}]
h[name] = d
#=> [{:age=>32, :co=>"Tesla"}, {:age=>31, :co=>"SpaceX"},
# {:age=>27, :co=>"PayPal"}]
and now
h #=> {"Paul Graham"=>[{:age=>31, :co=>"Viaweb"}],
# "Jan Koum" =>[{:age=>33, :co=>"WhatsApp"}],
# "Brian Acton"=>[{:age=>37, :co=>"WhatsApp"}],
# "Elon Musk" =>[{:age=>32, :co=>"Tesla"}, {:age=>31, :co=>"SpaceX"},
# {:age=>27, :co=>"PayPal"}]}

Answer 2

My guess is that maybe this expression might simply work OK:
\s*(\d+)\s*,\s*([^)|]*)(?=\s*\||\s*\))|([^(\r\n]*)\(
Test
re = /\s*(\d+)\s*,\s*([^)|]*)(?=\s*\||\s*\))|([^(\r\n]*)\(/
str = 'Elon Musk (32, Tesla | 31, SpaceX | 27, PayPal);
Garrett Camp (30, Uber);
'
str.scan(re) do |match|
puts match.to_s
end
Output
[nil, nil, "Elon Musk "]
["32", "Tesla ", nil]
["31", "SpaceX ", nil]
["27", "PayPal", nil]
[nil, nil, "Garrett Camp "]
["30", "Uber", nil]
If you wish to explore/simplify/modify the expression, it's been
explained on the top right panel of
regex101.com. If you'd like, you
can also watch in this
link, how it would match
against some sample inputs.