I have a string variable containing school names and I need to find all the possible combination of each word in this string variable in stata:
For example variation of a word "Academy" would be:
Academy,
Academy,
acdamey,
aacdemy,
dmcaamy,
aacedmy,
and so on.
I need this to standardize the raw data of school names, which has many typos of each word due to data entry issues, like the ones given above for "academy".
Depending whether your data is already in the Excel sheets or a file, you can either use regex trying to match all possible combinations (and probably fix them when found) or parse the strings first before bringing them into Excel. In either case you could make a file (or Excel list/table/area/etc.) that includes all the common typos and pick each typo as regex match to use when comparing to your actual input.
Making regexp that would actually find all possible cases is next to impossible, especially if there are cases where very similar (but correct) names for schools exist. In any case direct regexps would be very messy and complex, so I would advice you to parse the data by finding first the correct form, excluding it and then using (greedy) search/regex to find the typoed versions. You can then save the typos to use them as a filter/match/pattern.
To get some sort of starting ideas, check this links:
Regex: Search for verb roots
Read text file and extract string into Excel sheet using regex
P.s You should keep the count of all strings/school names and finally get a list of all names that did not match correct form or any of your regexp filters, so you can manually insert/correct them.
Related
Trying to fetch meaning of an entered text from urban dictionary. The problem is that urban dictionary shows several definitions posted by different users. I've used 'importxml' for fetching the first page that shows up when someone searches for a particular word.
Now I want this data to be split in different columns so that I can get each definition in seperate column.
If we look at the fetched data, at the end of every definition there is "by username month dd,yyyy" string.
How can I use this string to split that raw data into definitions in separate columns?
Tried RegEx but could not figure it out because this is the first time I'm using Regex.
replace string to unique symbol and then split by it
to capture string use the pattern:
"by username .+ \d+,\d{4}"
As you can read here, regex is not the correct tool for parsing HTML.
In your situation I will use Google Apps Script in combination with a DOMParser library, as cheerio.
Example:
const content = getContent_('https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nah');
const $ = Cheerio.load(content);
Logger.log($('.contributor').text());
Link To Spreadsheet
Sheet!1Name - Names are in Single Column
Sheet!2Names - Names are in First Name, Last Name columns.
What I'm trying to do is basically remove any suffixes, special characters, and spaces, capitalize that information, and combine it with information from another field.
I was able to figure out how to piece together some regex that seems to effectively get rid of suffixes and removes special characters. It's below. That's where my skill set stops.
={"PlayerKey";ARRAYFORMULA(UPPER(IF(ISBLANK(C2:C8),,PROPER(TRIM(REGEXREPLACE(C2:C8," Jr\.$| J$| Sr\.$| S$|IV$|III$|II$|\.|-|'",""))))))}
I'm having trouble nesting formulas - i believe what i need to do is nest both concat and substitute but not sure if that's the method to get the "Desired Output example" that is in the sheet. I'm also having trouble understanding what order to do things, which is why i'm having trouble with 2Name i think.
How's this in A1 of the new tab called MK.Help?
=ARRAYFORMULA({"Player Key";UPPER(TRIM(REGEXREPLACE(IF(MID(C2:C8,2,1)=".",INDEX(SPLIT(C2:C8," "),,1),LEFT(C2:C8))&D2:D8," Jr\.$| J$| Sr\.$| S$|IV$|III$|II$|\.|-|'",""))&E2:E8)})
Let's say I have the following strings:
"This [color=RGB]is[\color] a string."
"This [color=RGB][bold]is[\bold][\color] another string."
What I'm looking for is a good way to parse the string in order to extract the tag information and then reconstruct the original string without tags.
The tag informations will be used during text rendering.
Obviously I can achieve the goal by working directly with strings (find/substr/replace and so on), but I'm asking if there is another way cleaner, for example using regular expression.
Note:
There are very few tags I need, but there is the possibility to nest them (only of different type).
Can't use Boost.
There's a very simple answer that might work, depending on the complexity of your strings. (And me understanding you correctly, i.e. you just want to get the cleaned up strings, not actually extract the tags.) Just remove all tags. Replace
\[.*?]
with nothing. Example here
Now, if your string should be able to contain tag-like objects this might not work.
Regards
Intro
I work in a facility where we have microscopes. These guys can be asked to generate 4D movies of a sample: they take e.g. 10 pictures at different Z position, then wait a certain amount of time (next timepoint) and take 10 slices again.
They can be asked to save a file for each slice, and they use an explicit naming pattern, something like 2009-11-03-experiment1-Z07-T42.tif. The file names are numbered to reflect the Z position and the time point
Question
Once you have all these file names, you can use a regex pattern to extract the Z and T value, if you know the backbone pattern of the file name. This I know how to do.
The question I have is: do you know a way to automatically generate regex pattern from the file name list? For instance, there is an awesome tool on the net that does similar thing: txt2re.
What algorithm would you use to parse all the file name list and generate a most likely regex pattern?
There is a Perl module called String::Diff which has the ability to generate a regular expression for two different strings. The example it gives is
my $diff = String::Diff::diff_regexp('this is Perl', 'this is Ruby');
print "$diff\n";
outputs:
this\ is\ (?:Perl|Ruby)
Maybe you could feed pairs of filenames into this kind of thing to get an initial regex. However, this wouldn't give you capturing of numbers etc. so it wouldn't be completely automatic. After getting the diff you would have to hand-edit or do some kind of substitution to get a working final regex.
First of all, you are trying to do this the hard way. I suspect that this may not be impossible but you would have to apply some artificial intelligence techniques and it would be far more complicated than it is worth. Either neural networks or a genetic algorithm system could be trained to recognize the Z numbers and T numbers, assuming that the format of Z[0-9]+ and T[0-9]+ is always used somewhere in the regex.
What I would do with this problem is to write a Python script to process all of the filenames. In this script, I would match twice against the filename, one time looking for Z[0-9]+ and one time looking for T[0-9]+. Each time I would count the matches for Z-numbers and T-numbers.
I would keep four other counters with running totals, two for Z-numbers and two for T-numbers. Each pair would represent the count of filenames with 1 match, and the ones with multiple matches. And I would count the total number of filenames processed.
At the end, I would report as follows:
nnnnnnnnnn filenames processed
Z-numbers matched only once in nnnnnnnnnn filenames.
Z-numbers matched multiple times in nnnnnn filenames.
T-numbers matched only once in nnnnnnnnnn filenames.
T-numbers matched multiple times in nnnnnn filenames.
If you are lucky, there will be no multiple matches at all, and you could use the regexes above to extract your numbers. However, if there are any significant number of multiple matches, you can run the script again with some print statements to show you example filenames that provoke a multiple match. This would tell you whether or not a simple adjustment to the regex might work.
For instance, if you have 23,768 multiple matches on T-numbers, then make the script print every 500th filename with multiple matches, which would give you 47 samples to examine.
Probably something like [ -/.=]T[0-9]+[ -/.=] would be enough to get the multiple matches down to zero, while also giving a one-time match for every filename. Or at worst, [0-9][ -/.=]T[0-9]+[ -/.=]
For Python, see this question about TemplateMaker.
I recently discussed editors with a co-worker. He uses one of the less popular editors and I use another (I won't say which ones since it's not relevant and I want to avoid an editor flame war). I was saying that I didn't like his editor as much because it doesn't let you do find/replace with regular expressions.
He said he's never wanted to do that, which was surprising since it's something I find myself doing all the time. However, off the top of my head I wasn't able to come up with more than one or two examples. Can anyone here offer some examples of times when they've found regex find/replace useful in their editor? Here's what I've been able to come up with since then as examples of things that I've actually had to do:
Strip the beginning of a line off of every line in a file that looks like:
Line 25634 :
Line 632157 :
Taking a few dozen files with a standard header which is slightly different for each file and stripping the first 19 lines from all of them all at once.
Piping the result of a MySQL select statement into a text file, then removing all of the formatting junk and reformatting it as a Python dictionary for use in a simple script.
In a CSV file with no escaped commas, replace the first character of the 8th column of each row with a capital A.
Given a bunch of GDB stack traces with lines like
#3 0x080a6d61 in _mvl_set_req_done (req=0x82624a4, result=27158) at ../../mvl/src/mvl_serv.c:850
strip out everything from each line except the function names.
Does anyone else have any real-life examples? The next time this comes up, I'd like to be more prepared to list good examples of why this feature is useful.
Just last week, I used regex find/replace to convert a CSV file to an XML file.
Simple enough to do really, just chop up each field (luckily it didn't have any escaped commas) and push it back out with the appropriate tags in place of the commas.
Regex make it easy to replace whole words using word boundaries.
(\b\w+\b)
So you can replace unwanted words in your file without disturbing words like Scunthorpe
Yesterday I took a create table statement I made for an Oracle table and converted the fields to setString() method calls using JDBC and PreparedStatements. The table's field names were mapped to my class properties, so regex search and replace was the perfect fit.
Create Table text:
...
field_1 VARCHAR2(100) NULL,
field_2 VARCHAR2(10) NULL,
field_3 NUMBER(8) NULL,
field_4 VARCHAR2(100) NULL,
....
My Regex Search:
/([a-z_])+ .*?,?/
My Replacement:
pstmt.setString(1, \1);
The result:
...
pstmt.setString(1, field_1);
pstmt.setString(1, field_2);
pstmt.setString(1, field_3);
pstmt.setString(1, field_4);
....
I then went through and manually set the position int for each call and changed the method to setInt() (and others) where necessary, but that worked handy for me. I actually used it three or four times for similar field to method call conversions.
I like to use regexps to reformat lists of items like this:
int item1
double item2
to
public void item1(int item1){
}
public void item2(double item2){
}
This can be a big time saver.
I use it all the time when someone sends me a list of patient visit numbers in a column (say 100-200) and I need them in a '0000000444','000000004445' format. works wonders for me!
I also use it to pull out email addresses in an email. I send out group emails often and all the bounced returns come back in one email. So, I regex to pull them all out and then drop them into a string var to remove from the database.
I even wrote a little dialog prog to apply regex to my clipboard. It grabs the contents applies the regex and then loads it back into the clipboard.
One thing I use it for in web development all the time is stripping some text of its HTML tags. This might need to be done to sanitize user input for security, or for displaying a preview of a news article. For example, if you have an article with lots of HTML tags for formatting, you can't just do LEFT(article_text,100) + '...' (plus a "read more" link) and render that on a page at the risk of breaking the page by splitting apart an HTML tag.
Also, I've had to strip img tags in database records that link to images that no longer exist. And let's not forget web form validation. If you want to make a user has entered a correct email address (syntactically speaking) into a web form this is about the only way of checking it thoroughly.
I've just pasted a long character sequence into a string literal, and now I want to break it up into a concatenation of shorter string literals so it doesn't wrap. I also want it to be readable, so I want to break only after spaces. I select the whole string (minus the quotation marks) and do an in-selection-only replace-all with this regex:
/.{20,60} /
...and this replacement:
/$0"ΒΆ + "/
...where the pilcrow is an actual newline, and the number of spaces varies from one incident to the next. Result:
String s = "I recently discussed editors with a co-worker. He uses one "
+ "of the less popular editors and I use another (I won't say "
+ "which ones since it's not relevant and I want to avoid an "
+ "editor flame war). I was saying that I didn't like his "
+ "editor as much because it doesn't let you do find/replace "
+ "with regular expressions.";
The first thing I do with any editor is try to figure out it's Regex oddities. I use it all the time. Nothing really crazy, but it's handy when you've got to copy/paste stuff between different types of text - SQL <-> PHP is the one I do most often - and you don't want to fart around making the same change 500 times.
Regex is very handy any time I am trying to replace a value that spans multiple lines. Or when I want to replace a value with something that contains a line break.
I also like that you can match things in a regular expression and not replace the full match using the $# syntax to output the portion of the match you want to maintain.
I agree with you on points 3, 4, and 5 but not necessarily points 1 and 2.
In some cases 1 and 2 are easier to achieve using a anonymous keyboard macro.
By this I mean doing the following:
Position the cursor on the first line
Start a keyboard macro recording
Modify the first line
Position the cursor on the next line
Stop record.
Now all that is needed to modify the next line is to repeat the macro.
I could live with out support for regex but could not live without anonymous keyboard macros.