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.
Related
I want to select some string combination (with dots(.)) from a very long string (sql). The full string could be a single line or multiple line with new line separator, and this combination could be in start (at first line) or a next line (new line) or at both place.
I need help in writing a regex for it.
Examples:
String s = I am testing something like test.test.test in sentence.
Expected output: test.test.test
Example2 (real usecase):
UPDATE test.table
SET access = 01
WHERE access IN (
SELECT name FROM project.dataset.tablename WHERE name = 'test' GROUP BY 1 )
Expected output: test.table and project.dataset.tablename
, can I also add some prefix or suffix words or space which should be present where ever this logic gets checked. In above case if its update regex should pick test.table, but if the statement is like select test.table regex should not pick it up this combinations and same applies for suffix.
Example3: This is to illustrate the above theory.
INS INTO test.table
SEL 'abcscsc', wu_id.Item_Nbr ,1
FROM test.table as_t
WHERE as_t.old <> 0 AND as_t.date = 11
AND (as_t.numb IN ('11') )
Expected Output: test.table, test.table (Key words are INTO and FROM)
Things Not Needed in selection:as_t.numb, as_t.old, as_t.date
If I get the regex I can use in program to extract this word.
Note: Before and after string words to the combination could be anything like update, select { or(, so we have to find the occurrence of words which are joined together with .(dot) and all the number of such occurrence.
I tried something like this:
(?<=.)(.?)(?=.)(.?) -: This only selected the word between two .dot and not all.
.(?<=.)(.?)(?=.)(.?). - This everything before and after.
To solve your initial problem, we can just use some negation. Here's the pattern I came up with:
[^\s]+\.[^\s]+
[^ ... ] Means to make a character class including everything except for what's between the brackets. In this case, I put \s in there, which matches any whitespace. So [^\s] matches anything that isn't whitespace.
+ Is a quantifier. It means to find as many of the preceding construct as you can without breaking the match. This would happily match everything that's not whitespace, but I follow it with a \., which matches a literal .. The \ is necessary because . means to match any character in regex, so we need to escape it so it only has its literal meaning. This means there has to be a . in this group of non-whitespace characters.
I end the pattern with another [^\s]+, which matches everything after the . until the next whitespace.
Now, to solve your secondary problem, you want to make this match only work if it is preceded by a given keyword. Luckily, regex has a construct almost specifically for this case. It's called a lookbehind. The syntax is (?<= ... ) where the ... is the pattern you want to look for. Using your example, this will only match after the keywords INTO and FROM:
(?<=(?:INTO|FROM)\s)[^\s]+\.[^\s]+
Here (?:INTO|FROM) means to match either the text INTO or the text FROM. I then specify that it should be followed by a whitespace character with \s. One possible problem here is that it will only match if the keywords are written in all upper case. You can change this behavior by specifying the case insensitive flag i to your regex parser. If your regex parser doesn't have a way to specify flags, you can usually still specify it inline by putting (?i) in front of the pattern, like so:
(?i)(?<=(?:INTO|FROM)\s)[^\s]+\.[^\s]+
If you are new to regex, I highly recommend using the www.regex101.com website to generate regex and learn how it works. Don't forget to check out the code generator part for getting the regex code based on the programming language you are using, that's a cool feature.
For your question, you need a regex that understands any word character \w that matches between 0 and unlimited times, followed by a dot, followed by another series of word character that repeats between 0 and unlimited times.
So here is my solution to your question:
Your regex in JavaScript:
const regex = /([\w][.][\w])+/gm;
in Java:
final String regex = "([\w][.][\w])+";
in Python:
regex = r"([\w][.][\w])+"
in PHP:
$re = '/([\w][.][\w])+/m';
Note that: this solution is written for your use case (to be used for SQL strings), because now if you have something like '.word' or 'word..word', it will still catch it which I assume you don't have a string like that.
See this screenshot for more details
I have a special task which requires lots of regex and javascript parsing.
My head is almost exploding, so maybe I'm tired and forgot some small thing else I'm not newbie to regex so perhaps someone will point me to good direction here and show me where I did mistake.
So I have this regex code:
((?<=\ffmpg=).+(?=////u0026cs=nt))
to get the value of substring between 2 strings. The first string is called:
ffmpg= from this string it should start and it will end just before the other string start called //u0026cs=nt
The problem is that it is working fine until the html page contains only one parameter with the same name; because the source html has inside like 10's of ffmg and the same end string called cs=nt.
I can not even make regex to count the characters because every time you visit the html page the number of characters are different, sometimes +3 else +10. So the only way is to get this sting from the start of param1 to the end of param2.
This is the string I need to get: 1714248%2C23851735%2C23804281%2C23839597%2C23357901%2C3313341%2C3316343%2C23848795%2C3300132%2C26853996%2C3300114%2C3315790%2C23857451%2C23856472%2C23851936%2C3300161%2C3314786%2C23856652%2C23859863%2C23837993%2C23833479%2C23861502%2C23842630%2C23842986%2C23861012
This is the source html example:
\u0026doc=IcuU5Oy8\u0026pen=V9PXaHoOp1gKD25rgAg\u0026ffmpg=1714248%2C23851735%2C23804281%2C23839597%2C23357901%2C3313341%2C3316343%2C23848795%2C3300132%2C26853996%2C3300114%2C3315790%2C23857451%2C23856472%2C23851936%2C3300161%2C3314786%2C23856652%2C23859863%2C23837993%2C23833479%2C23861502%2C23842630%2C23842986%2C23861012\u0026cs=nt\u0026token=gHgig8eLY3qsQ0bXa\\u0026doc=IcuU5Oy8\u0026pen=V9PXaHoOp1gKD25rgAg\u0026ffmpg=1714248%2C23851735%2C23804281%2C23839597%2C23357901%2C3313341%2C3316343%2C23848795%2C3300132%2C26853996%2C3300114%2C3315790%2C23857451%2C23856472%2C23851936%2C3300161%2C3314786%2C23856652%2C23859863%2C23837993%2C23833479%2C23861502%2C23842630%2C23842986%2C23861012\u0026cs=nt\u0026token=gHgig8eLY3qsQ0bXa\\u0026doc=IcuU5Oy8\u0026pen=V9PXaHoOp1gKD25rgAg\u0026ffmpg=1714248%2C23851735%2C23804281%2C23839597%2C23357901%2C3313341%2C3316343%2C23848795%2C3300132%2C26853996%2C3300114%2C3315790%2C23857451%2C23856472%2C23851936%2C3300161%2C3314786%2C23856652%2C23859863%2C23837993%2C23833479%2C23861502%2C23842630%2C23842986%2C23861012\u0026cs=nt\u0026token=gHgig8eLY3qsQ0bXa\
I have copied 3 times the same just for this purpose because it is very big html source and I doubt I can upload it here.
Thanks for your help.
In your questions, you use (?<=\ffmpg=) where \f will match a form feed character which is not present in the data example. If you meant to use \\f it will match \f which is also not present in the example data.
You could get the match using a capturing group instead of using lookarounds as lookbehinds are not widely supported by all browsers.
If you just want to get a single match, you can omit the /g global flag.
If you use .+ you will match too much as the .+ will match until the end of the string and then backtracks until the first time it can match \\u0026cs=nt
What you could do instead is be specific in what you would allow to match which for the current string is a character class with the following characters [AC0-9%]+
You could broaden the character class with a range to match chars A-Z instead of AC for example and add more chars or ranges as required.
ffmpg=([AC0-9%]+)\\\\u0026cs=nt
Regex demo
For example
const regex = /ffmpg=([AC0-9%]+)\\\\u0026cs=nt/;
const str = `\\\\u0026doc=IcuU5Oy8\\\\u0026pen=V9PXaHoOp1gKD25rgAg\\\\u0026ffmpg=1714248%2C23851735%2C23804281%2C23839597%2C23357901%2C3313341%2C3316343%2C23848795%2C3300132%2C26853996%2C3300114%2C3315790%2C23857451%2C23856472%2C23851936%2C3300161%2C3314786%2C23856652%2C23859863%2C23837993%2C23833479%2C23861502%2C23842630%2C23842986%2C23861012\\\\u0026cs=nt\\\\u0026token=gHgig8eLY3qsQ0bXa\\\\\\\\u0026doc=IcuU5Oy8\\\\u0026pen=V9PXaHoOp1gKD25rgAg\\\\u0026ffmpg=1714248%2C23851735%2C23804281%2C23839597%2C23357901%2C3313341%2C3316343%2C23848795%2C3300132%2C26853996%2C3300114%2C3315790%2C23857451%2C23856472%2C23851936%2C3300161%2C3314786%2C23856652%2C23859863%2C23837993%2C23833479%2C23861502%2C23842630%2C23842986%2C23861012\\\\u0026cs=nt\\\\u0026token=gHgig8eLY3qsQ0bXa\\\\\\\\u0026doc=IcuU5Oy8\\\\u0026pen=V9PXaHoOp1gKD25rgAg\\\\u0026ffmpg=1714248%2C23851735%2C23804281%2C23839597%2C23357901%2C3313341%2C3316343%2C23848795%2C3300132%2C26853996%2C3300114%2C3315790%2C23857451%2C23856472%2C23851936%2C3300161%2C3314786%2C23856652%2C23859863%2C23837993%2C23833479%2C23861502%2C23842630%2C23842986%2C23861012\\\\u0026cs=nt\\\\u0026token=gHgig8eLY3qsQ0bXa\\\\`;
console.log(str.match(regex)[1]);
Try this:
(?<=ffmpg=)([A-F0-9%]+)
Explanation
Since your string only consists of url-encoded characters, you can use [A-F0-9%]+character class to capture it. It will stop when next string starts because there will be a backslash.
See online demo here.
I'm having an issue with Regex.
I'm trying to match T0000001 (2, 3 and so on).
However, some of the lines it searches has what I can describe as positioners. These are shown as a question mark, followed by 2 digits, such as ?21.
These positioners describe a new position if the document were to be printed off the website.
Example:
T123?214567
T?211234567
I need to disregard ?21 and match T1234567.
From what I can see, this is not possible.
I have looked everywhere and tried numerous attempts.
All we have to work off is the linked image. The creators cant even confirm the flavour of Regex it is - they believe its Python but I'm unsure.
Regex Image
Update
Unfortunately none of the codes below have worked so far. I thought to test each code in live (Rather than via regex thinking may work different but unfortunately still didn't work)
There is no replace feature, and as mentioned before I'm not sure if it is Python. Appreciate your help.
Do two regex operations
First do the regex replace to replace the positioners with an empty string.
(\?[0-9]{2})
Then do the regex match
T[0-9]{7}
If there's only one occurrence of the 'positioners' in each match, something like this should work: (T.*?)\?\d{2}(.*)
This can be tested here: https://regex101.com/r/XhQXkh/2
Basically, match two capture groups before and after the '?21' sequence. You'll need to concatenate these two matches.
At first, match the ?21 and repace it with a distinctive character, #, etc
\?21
Demo
and you may try this regex to find what you want
(T(?:\d{7}|[\#\d]{8}))\s
Demo,,, in which target string is captured to group 1 (or \1).
Finally, replace # with ?21 or something you like.
Python script may be like this
ss="""T123?214567
T?211234567
T1234567
T1234434?21
T5435433"""
rexpre= re.compile(r'\?21')
regx= re.compile(r'(T(?:\d{7}|[\#\d]{8}))\s')
for m in regx.findall(rexpre.sub('#',ss)):
print(m)
print()
for m in regx.findall(rexpre.sub('#',ss)):
print(re.sub('#',r'?21', m))
Output is
T123#4567
T#1234567
T1234567
T1234434#
T123?214567
T?211234567
T1234567
T1234434?21
If using a replace functionality is an option for you then this might be an approach to match T0000001 or T123?214567:
Capture a T followed by zero or more digits before the optional part in group 1 (T\d*)
Make the question mark followed by 2 digits part optional (?:\?\d{2})?
Capture one or more digits after in group 2 (\d+).
Then in the replacement you could use group1group2 \1\2.
Using word boundaries \b (Or use assertions for the start and the end of the line ^ $) this could look like:
\b(T\d*)(?:\?\d{2})?(\d+)\b
Example Python
Is the below what you want?
Use RegExReplace with multiline tag (m) and enable replace all occurrences!
Pattern = (T\d*)\?\d{2}(\d*)
replace = $1$2
Usage Example:
I am re-phrasing my question to clear confusions!
I want to match if a string has certain letters for this I use the character class:
[ACD]
and it works perfectly!
but I want to match if the string has those letter(s) 2 or more times either repeated or 2 separate letters
For example:
[AKL] should match:
ABCVL
AAGHF
KKUI
AKL
But the above should not match the following:
ABCD
KHID
LOVE
because those are there but only once!
that's why I was trying to use:
[ACD]{2,}
But it's not working, probably it's not the right Regex.. can somebody a Regex guru can help me solve this puzzle?
Thanks
PS: I will use it on MYSQL - a differnt approach can also welcome! but I like to use regex for smarter and shorter query!
To ensure that a string contains at least two occurencies in a set of letters (lets say A K L as in your example), you can write something like this:
[AKL].*[AKL]
Since the MySQL regex engine is a DFA, there is no need to use a negated character class like [^AKL] in place of the dot to avoid backtracking, or a lazy quantifier that is not supported at all.
example:
SELECT 'KKUI' REGEXP '[AKL].*[AKL]';
will return 1
You can follow this link that speaks on the particular subject of the LIKE and the REGEXP features in MySQL.
If I understood you correctly, this is quite simple:
[A-Z].*?[A-Z]
This looks for your something in your set, [A-Z], and then lazily matches characters until it (potentially) comes across the set, [A-Z], again.
As #Enigmadan pointed out, a lazy match is not necessary here: [A-Z].*[A-Z]
The expression you are using searches for characters between 2 and unlimited times with these characters ACDFGHIJKMNOPQRSTUVWXZ.
However, your RegEx expression is excluding Y (UVWXZ])) therefore Z cannot be found since it is not surrounded by another character in your expression and the same principle applies to B ([ACD) also excluded in you RegEx expression. For example Z and A would match in an expression like ZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZA
If those were not excluded on purpose probably better can be to use ranges like [A-Z]
If you want 2 or more of a match on [AKL], then you may use just [AKL] and may have match >= 2.
I am not good at SQL regex, but may be something like this?
check (dbo.RegexMatch( ['ABCVL'], '[AKL]' ) >= 2)
To put it in simple English, use [AKL] as your regex, and check the match on the string to be greater than 2. Here's how I would do in Java:
private boolean search2orMore(String string) {
Matcher matcher = Pattern.compile("[ACD]").matcher(string);
int counter = 0;
while (matcher.find())
{
counter++;
}
return (counter >= 2);
}
You can't use [ACD]{2,} because it always wants to match 2 or more of each characters and will fail if you have 2 or more matching single characters.
your question is not very clear, but here is my trial pattern
\b(\S*[AKL]\S*[AKL]\S*)\b
Demo
pretty sure this should work in any case
(?<l>[^AKL\n]*[AKL]+[^AKL\n]*[AKL]+[^AKL\n]*)[\n\r]
replace AKL for letters you need can be done very easily dynamicly tell me if you need it
Is this what you are looking for?
".*(.*[AKL].*){2,}.*" (without quotes)
It matches if there are at least two occurences of your charactes sorrounded by anything.
It is .NET regex, but should be same for anything else
Edit
Overall, MySQL regular expression support is pretty weak.
If you only need to match your capture group a minimum of two times, then you can simply use:
select * from ... where ... regexp('([ACD].*){2,}') #could be `2,` or just `2`
If you need to match your capture group more than two times, then just change the number:
select * from ... where ... regexp('([ACD].*){3}')
#This number should match the number of matches you need
If you needed a minimum of 7 matches and you were using your previous capture group [ACDF-KM-XZ]
e.g.
select * from ... where ... regexp('([ACDF-KM-XZ].*){7,}')
Response before edit:
Your regex is trying to find at least two characters from the set[ACDFGHIJKMNOPQRSTUVWXZ].
([ACDFGHIJKMNOPQRSTUVWXZ]){2,}
The reason A and Z are not being matched in your example string (ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ) is because you are looking for two or more characters that are together that match your set. A is a single character followed by a character that does not match your set. Thus, A is not matched.
Similarly, Z is a single character preceded by a character that does not match your set. Thus, Z is not matched.
The bolded characters below do not match your set
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
If you were to do a global search in the string, only the italicized characters would be matched:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Is there a simple way to ignore the white space in a target string when searching for matches using a regular expression pattern? For example, if my search is for "cats", I would want "c ats" or "ca ts" to match. I can't strip out the whitespace beforehand because I need to find the begin and end index of the match (including any whitespace) in order to highlight that match and any whitespace needs to be there for formatting purposes.
You can stick optional whitespace characters \s* in between every other character in your regex. Although granted, it will get a bit lengthy.
/cats/ -> /c\s*a\s*t\s*s/
While the accepted answer is technically correct, a more practical approach, if possible, is to just strip whitespace out of both the regular expression and the search string.
If you want to search for "my cats", instead of:
myString.match(/m\s*y\s*c\s*a\*st\s*s\s*/g)
Just do:
myString.replace(/\s*/g,"").match(/mycats/g)
Warning: You can't automate this on the regular expression by just replacing all spaces with empty strings because they may occur in a negation or otherwise make your regular expression invalid.
Addressing Steven's comment to Sam Dufel's answer
Thanks, sounds like that's the way to go. But I just realized that I only want the optional whitespace characters if they follow a newline. So for example, "c\n ats" or "ca\n ts" should match. But wouldn't want "c ats" to match if there is no newline. Any ideas on how that might be done?
This should do the trick:
/c(?:\n\s*)?a(?:\n\s*)?t(?:\n\s*)?s/
See this page for all the different variations of 'cats' that this matches.
You can also solve this using conditionals, but they are not supported in the javascript flavor of regex.
You could put \s* inbetween every character in your search string so if you were looking for cat you would use c\s*a\s*t\s*s\s*s
It's long but you could build the string dynamically of course.
You can see it working here: http://www.rubular.com/r/zzWwvppSpE
If you only want to allow spaces, then
\bc *a *t *s\b
should do it. To also allow tabs, use
\bc[ \t]*a[ \t]*t[ \t]*s\b
Remove the \b anchors if you also want to find cats within words like bobcats or catsup.
This approach can be used to automate this
(the following exemplary solution is in python, although obviously it can be ported to any language):
you can strip the whitespace beforehand AND save the positions of non-whitespace characters so you can use them later to find out the matched string boundary positions in the original string like the following:
def regex_search_ignore_space(regex, string):
no_spaces = ''
char_positions = []
for pos, char in enumerate(string):
if re.match(r'\S', char): # upper \S matches non-whitespace chars
no_spaces += char
char_positions.append(pos)
match = re.search(regex, no_spaces)
if not match:
return match
# match.start() and match.end() are indices of start and end
# of the found string in the spaceless string
# (as we have searched in it).
start = char_positions[match.start()] # in the original string
end = char_positions[match.end()] # in the original string
matched_string = string[start:end] # see
# the match WITH spaces is returned.
return matched_string
with_spaces = 'a li on and a cat'
print(regex_search_ignore_space('lion', with_spaces))
# prints 'li on'
If you want to go further you can construct the match object and return it instead, so the use of this helper will be more handy.
And the performance of this function can of course also be optimized, this example is just to show the path to a solution.
The accepted answer will not work if and when you are passing a dynamic value (such as "current value" in an array loop) as the regex test value. You would not be able to input the optional white spaces without getting some really ugly regex.
Konrad Hoffner's solution is therefore better in such cases as it will strip both the regest and test string of whitespace. The test will be conducted as though both have no whitespace.