I am working with government measures and am required to parse a string that contains variable information based on delimiters that come from issuing bodies associated with the fda.
I am trying to retrieve the delimiter and the value after the delimiter. I have searched for hours to find a regex solution to retrieve both the delimiter and the value that follows it and, though there seems to be posts that handle this, the code found in the post haven't worked.
One of the major issues in this task is that the delimiters often have repeated characters. For instance: delimiters are used such as "=", "=,", "/=". In this case I would need to tell the difference between "=" and "=,".
Is there a regex that would handle all of this?
Here is an example of the string :
=/A9999XYZ=>100T0479&,1Blah
Notice the delimiters are:
"=/"
"=>'
"&,1"
Any help would be appreciated.
You can use a regex like this
(=/|=>|&,1)|(\w+)
Working demo
The idea is that the first group contains the delimiters and the 2nd group the content. I assume the content can be word characters (a to z and digits with underscore). You have then to grab the content of every capturing group.
You need to capture both the delimiter and the value as group 1 and 2 respectively.
If your values are all alphanumeric, use this:
(&,1|\W+)(\w+)
See live demo.
If your values can contain non-alphanumeric characters, it get complicated:
(=/|=>|=,|=|&,1)((?:.(?!=/|=>|=,|=|&,1))+.)
See live demo.
Code the delimiters longest first, eg "=," before "=", otherwise the alternation, which matches left to right, will match "=" and the comma will become part of the value.
This uses a negative look ahead to stop matching past the next delimiter.
Related
Firstly, apologies; I'm fairly new to the world of RegEx.
Secondly (more of an FYI), I'm using an application that only has RegEx Replace functionality, therefore I'm potentially going to be limited on what can/can't be achieved.
The Challange
I have a free text field (labelled Description) that primarily contains "useless" text. However, some records will contain either one or multiple IDs that are useful and I would like to extract said IDs.
Every ID will have the same three-letter prefix (APP) followed by a five digit numeric value (e.g. 12911).
For example, I have the following string in my Description Field;
APP00001Was APP00002TEST APP00003Blah blah APP00004 Apple APP11112OrANGE APP
THE JOURNEY
I've managed to very crudely put together an expression that is close to what I need (although, I actually need the reverse);
/!?APP\d{1,5}/g
Result;
THE STRUGGLE
However, on the Replace, I'm only able to retain the non-matched values;
Was TEST Blah blah Apple OrANGE APP
THE ENDGAME
I would like the output to be;
APP00001 APP00002 APP00003 APP00004 APP11112
Apologies once again if this is somewhat of a 'noddy' question; but any help would be much appreciated and all ideas welcome.
Many thanks in advance.
You could use an alternation | to capture either the pattern starting with a word boundary in group 1 or match 1+ word chars followed by optional whitespace chars.
What you capture in group 1 can be used as the replacement. The matches will not be in the replacement.
Using !? matches an optional exclamation mark. You could prepend that to the pattern, but it is not part of the example data.
\b(APP\d{1,5})\w*|\w+\s*
See a regex demo
In the replacement use capture group 1, mostly using $1 or \1
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.
Sample input:
___file___name___2000___ed2___1___2___3
DIFFERENT+FILENAME+(2000)+1+2+3+ed10
Desired output (eg, all letters and 4-digit numbers and literal 'ed' followed immediately by a digit of arbitrary length:
file name 2000 ed2
DIFFERENT FILENAME 2000 ed10
I am using:
[A-Za-z]+|[\d]{4}|ed\d+ which only returns:
file name 2000 ed
DIFFERENT FILENAME 2000 ed
I see that there is a related Q+A here:Regular Expression to match specific string followed by number?
eg using ed[0-9]* would match ed#, but unsure why it does not match in the above.
As written, your regex is correct. Remember, however, that regex tries to match its statements from left to right. Your ed\d+ is never going to match, because the ed was already consumed by your [A-Za-z] alternative. Reorder your regex and it'll work just fine:
ed\d+|[a-zA-Z]+|\d{4}
Demo
Nick's answer is right, but because in-order matching can be a less readable "gotcha", the best (order-insensitive) ways to do this kind of search are 1) with specified delimiters, and 2) by making each search term unique.
Jan's answer handles #1 well. But you would have to specify each specific delimiter, including its length (e.g. ___). It sounds like you may have some unusual delimiters, so this may not be ideal.
For #2, then, you can make each search term unique. (That is, you want the thing matching "file" and "name" to be distinct from the thing matching "2000", and both to be distinct from the thing matching "ed2".)
One way to do this is [A-Za-z]+(?![0-9a-zA-Z])|[\d]{4}|ed\d+. This is saying that for the first type of search term, you want an alphabet string which is followed by a non-alphanumeric character. This keeps it distinct from the third search term, which is an alphabet string followed by some digit(s). This also allows you to specify any range of delimiters inside of that negative lookbehind.
demo
You might very well use (just grab the first capturing group):
(?:^|___|[+(]) # delimiter before
([a-zA-Z0-9]{2,}) # the actual content
(?=$|___|[+)]) # delimiter afterwards
See a demo on regex101.com
I'm trying to looking for Street|St|Drive|Dr and then get all the contents of the line to extract the address:
(?:(?!\s{2,}|\$).)*(Street|St|Drive|Dr).*?(?=\s{2,})
.. but it also matches:
Full match 420-442 ` Tax Invoice/Statement`
Group 1. 433-435 `St`
Full match 4858-4867 `163.66 DR`
Group 1. 4865-4867 `DR`
Full match 11053-11089 ` Permanent Water Saving Plan, please`
Group 1. 11077-11079 `Pl`
How do i match only whole words and not substrings so it ignores words that contain those words (the first match for example).
One option is to use the the word-boundary anchor, \b, to accomplish this:
(?:(?!\s{2,}|\$).)*\b(Street|St|Drive|Dr)\b.*?(?=\s{2,})
If you provide an example of the raw text you're parsing, I'll be able to give additional help if this doesn't work.
Edit:
From the link you posted in a comment, it seems that the \b solution solves your question:
How do i match only whole words and not substrings so it ignores words that contain those words (the first match for example).
However, it seems like there are additional issues with your regex.
I'm having trouble to compute 2 regex in one (used to deal with .ini files)
I've got this one (I suggest you to use rubular with theses examples to understand)
^(?<key>[^=;\r\n]+)=((?<value>\"*.*;*.*\"[^;\r\n]*);?(?<comment>.*)[^\r\n]*)
to match :
This="isnot;acomment"
This="isa";comment
This="isa;special";case
And I've got this one :
^(?<key>[^=;\r\n]+)=(?<value>[^;\r\n]*);?(?<comment>[^\r\n]*)
to match
This=isasimplecase
This=isasimple;comment
And I'm trying to merge the 2 regex, sadly I do not manage to say "If my value group is not starting with \" use the second one if not use the first one".
Right now i've got this :
^(?<key>[^=;\r\n]+)=(((?<value>\"*.*;*.*\"[^;\r\n]*);?(?<comment>.*)[^\r\n]*)|(?<value>[^;\r\n]*);?(?<comment>[^\r\n]*))
But it's creating 2 more sections unnamed for the simple case without quoted. I was thinking that maybe by adding "the first item of the value group for the simple case must not start with \". But I didn't manage to do it.
PS : I suggest you to use rubular to understand better my problem. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough
How about this?
^(?<key>[^=;\r\n]+)=(?<value>"[^"]*"|[^;\n\r]*);?(?<comment>.*)
DEMO
(?<key>[^=;\r\n]+) Matches the part before the = symbol.
"[^"]*" Matches the string within the double quotes , ex strings like "foobar". If there is no " then the regex engine move on to the next pattern that is [^;\n\r]* and it matches upto the first ; or newline or \r character. These matched characters are stored into a named group called value.
;? Optional semicolon.
(?<comment>.*) Remaining characters are stored into the comment group.