I'm cleaning up some ancient HTML help files and there are a lot of double-spaces that I'd like to clean up (replace each double-space with single).
Sample: <li><b>% Successful</b>. The percentage of jobs that returned a confirmation.</li>
I want to find double-spaces only before the start of sentences or between words (so between the setting label or between 'percentage' and 'of', not spaces in isolation or before the XML tags).
I tried a simple search for two spaces, but that also brings up the tab/space mixture that the creator used for formatting the indents, so I'm getting five useless results for every relevant one.
Is there a single regex that would help with both use cases, or is it better to use two different ones for each format? I'm fine either way, just am still pretty new to regexes and not sure where to start on this one.
Spaces between periods and text (three here for a better visual):
<li><b>Submit Time</b>. The time the job was scheduled.</li>
Spaces between words (three here as well):
<li><b>End Time</b>. The date/time when the job was completed or canceled.</li>
I'm looking for multiple spaces either between words or at the start of sentences (generally after the setting name period).
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)})
I am using the sortable list view by #Taifun in one of my apps, and I am trying to debug a problem with the values that I get from the list.
The user adds items to the list and then they are saved to a custom tinyWebDB.
My question is this- Does the sortable list remove leading or trailing spaces either when loading the list or when getting the value back out? If so, is there any way to disable or fix this behavior?
I can't figure out why the values my app is storing are wrong, and I can't see whether the items have trailing spaces just from looking at the list view.
If it isn't the list view, it might be the way I am sorting the items.
As I wrote in the comment above, I wrote a procedure to replace the leading and trailing spaces with ^ in the list view and convert them back when saving.
Here is a link to the aia file.
The aia is set up for what I was using it for- displaying two lists side by side. I did this by adding a dash "‒" between the items of each list. If you are not using the list in this way, you only need to copy the two procedures that are shown below.
This procedure replaces leading and trailing spaces with the ^ mark by checking if the first or last characters are spaces. If the string is longer than 2 characters, those are put in the middle without changing.
This procedure does the opposite and converts the ^'s that are in the first and last characters back into spaces.
I have a CSV file which has been generated by a system. The problem is with one of the fields which used to be a list of items. An example of the original list is below....
The serial number of the desk is 45TYTU
This is the second item in the list
The colour of the apple is green
The ID code is 489RUI
This is the fourth item in the list.
And unfortunately the system spits out the code below.....
The serial number of the desk is 45TYTUThis is the second item in the listThe colour of the apple is greenThe ID code is 489RUIThis is the fourth item in the list.
As you can see, it ignores the line breaks and just bunches everything up. I am unable to modify the system that generates this output so what I am trying to do is come up with some sort of regex find and replace expression that will separate them out.
My original though would be to try and detect when an upper case letter is in the middle of a lower case word, but as in one of the items in the example, when a serial number is used it throws this out.
Anyone any suggestions? Is regex the way to go?
--- EDIT ---
I think i need to simplify things for myself, if I ignore the fact that lines that end in a serial number will break things for now. I need to just create an expression that will insert a line break if it detects that an upper case letter is being used after a lower case one
--- EDIT 2 ---
Using the example given by fardjad everything works for the sample data given, the strong was...
(.(?=[A-Z][a-z]))
Now as I test with more data I can see an issue appearing, certain lines begin with numbers so it is seeing these as serial numbers, you can see an example of this at http://regexr.com?2vfi5
There are only about 10 known numbers it uses at the start of the lines such as 240v, 120v etc...
Is there a way to exclude these?
That won't be a robust solution but this is what you asked. It matches the character before an uppercase letter followed by a lowercase one. You can simply use regex replace and append a new line character:
(.(?=[A-Z][a-z]))
see this demo.
You could search for this
(?<=\p{Ll})(?=\p{Lu})
and replace with a linebreak. The regex matches the empty space between a lowercase letter \p{Ll} and an uppercase letter \p{Lu}.
This assumes you're using a Unicode-aware regex engine (.NET, PCRE, Perl for example). If not, you might also get away with
(?<=[a-z])(?=[A-Z])
but this of course only detects lower-/uppercase changes in ASCII words.
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"¶ + "/
...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.