How can I use regular expressions to select text between commas? - regex

Question

I am using BigQuery on Google Cloud Platform to extract data from GDELT. This uses an SQL syntax and regular expressions.
I have a column of data (called V2Tone), in which each cell looks like this:
1.55763239875389,2.80373831775701,1.24610591900312,4.04984423676012,26.4797507788162,2.49221183800623,299
To select only the first number (i.e., the number before the first comma) using regular expressions, we use this:
regexp_replace(V2Tone, r',.*', '')
How can we select only the second number (i.e., the number between the first and second commas)?
How about the third number (i.e., the number between the second and third commas)?
I understand that re2 syntax (https://github.com/google/re2/wiki/Syntax) is used here, but my understanding of how to put that all together is limited.
If anything is unclear, please let me know. Thank you for your help as I learn to use regular expressions.

Answer 1

Below example is for BigQuery Standard SQL using super simple SPLIT approach
#standardSQL
SELECT
SPLIT(V2Tone)[SAFE_OFFSET(0)] first_number,
SPLIT(V2Tone)[SAFE_OFFSET(1)] second_number,
SPLIT(V2Tone)[SAFE_OFFSET(2)] third_number
FROM `project.dataset.table`
If for some reason you need/want to use regexp here - use below
#standardSQL
SELECT
REGEXP_EXTRACT(V2Tone, r'^(.*?),') first_number,
REGEXP_EXTRACT(V2Tone, r'^(?:(?:.*?),)(.*?),') second_number,
REGEXP_EXTRACT(V2Tone, r'^(?:(?:.*?),){2}(.*?),') third_number,
REGEXP_EXTRACT(V2Tone, r'^(?:(?:.*?),){4}(.*?),') fifth_number
FROM `project.dataset.table`
Note use of REGEXP_EXTRACT instead of REGEXP_REPLACE
You can play, test above options with dummy string from your question as below
#standardSQL
WITH `project.dataset.table` AS (
SELECT '1.55763239875389,2.80373831775701,1.24610591900312,4.04984423676012,26.4797507788162,2.49221183800623,299' V2Tone
)
SELECT
SPLIT(V2Tone)[SAFE_OFFSET(0)] first_number,
SPLIT(V2Tone)[SAFE_OFFSET(1)] second_number,
SPLIT(V2Tone)[SAFE_OFFSET(2)] third_number,
REGEXP_EXTRACT(V2Tone, r'^(.*?),') first_number_re,
REGEXP_EXTRACT(V2Tone, r'^(?:(?:.*?),)(.*?),') second_number_re,
REGEXP_EXTRACT(V2Tone, r'^(?:(?:.*?),){2}(.*?),') third_number_re,
REGEXP_EXTRACT(V2Tone, r'^(?:(?:.*?),){4}(.*?),') fifth_number_re
FROM `project.dataset.table`
with output :
first_number second_number third_number first_number_re second_number_re third_number_re fifth_number_re
1.55763239875389 2.80373831775701 1.24610591900312 1.55763239875389 2.80373831775701 1.24610591900312 26.4797507788162

Answer 2

I don't know of a single regex replace which could be used to isolate a single number in your CSV string, because we need to remove things on both sides of the match, in general. But, we can chain together two calls to regex_replace. For example, if you wanted to target the third number in the CSV string, we could try this:
regexp_replace(regexp_replace(V2Tone, r'^(?:(?:\d+(?:\.\d+)?),){2}', ''),
r',.*', ''))
The pattern I am using to strip of the first n numbers is this:
^(?:(?:\d+(?:\.\d+)?),){n}
This just removes a number, followed by a comma, n times, from the beginning of the string.
Demo

Answer 3

Here is a solution with a single regex replace:
^([^,]+(?:,|$)){2}([^,]+(?:,|$))*|^.*$
Demo
\n is added to the negated character class in the demo to avoid matching accross lines in m|multiline mode.
Usage:
regexp_replace(V2Tone, r'^([^,]+(?:,|$)){2}([^,]+(?:,|$))*|^.*$', '$1')
Explanation:
([^,]+(?:,|$){n} captures everything to the next comma or the end of the string n times
([^,]+(?:,|$))* captures the rest 0 or more times
^.*$ capture everything if we cannot match n times
And then, finally, we can reinsert the nth match using $1.