Extracting data using regex from bank feed - regex

Question

I am looking to extract some text from a raw credit card feed for a workflow. I have gotten almost where I want to but am struggling with the final piece of information I'm trying to extract.
An example of the raw feed is:
LEO'SFINEFOOD&WINEHARTWELLJune350.0735.00ICGROUP,INC.MELBOURNEJune5UNITEDSTATESDOLLARAUD50.07includesconversioncommissionofAUD1.469.96WOOLWORTHS3335CHADSTOCHADSTONE
I am looking to extract this from the above:
(ICGROUP,INC.MELBOURNE)June5UNITEDSTATESDOLLARAUD(50.07)includesconversioncommissionof
with the brackets representing the two groups I am after. The consistent parts across all instances of what I'm trying to extract is:
DIGITS (TEXT) DATE TEXT AMOUNT includesconversioncommissionof
I have been able to use the regex:
([A-Z][a-z]\d)[A-Z]AUD(\d\,?\d+?.\d*)includesconversioncommissionofAUD
to get me the date and the amount. I am struggling to find a way to get as per the example above the words ICGROUP,INC.MELBOURNE
I have tried putting \d\d(.*) before the above regex but that doesn't work for some reason.
Would appreciate if anyone is able to help with what I'm after!

Answer 1

The closest I think we can get (PCRE) is something like:
/
[\d,.]+ # a currency value to bookend
(.+?) # capture everything in-between
[A-Z][a-z]+\d+ # a month followed by a day, e.g. "June5"
.+? # everything in-between
([\d,.]+) # capture a currency value
includesconversioncommissionof # our magic token to bookend
/x
The technique here is to pit greedy expressions against non-greedy expressions in a very deliberate way. Let me know if you have any questions about it. I would be extremely hesitant to put this in production—or even trust its output as an ad-hoc pass—without rigorous testing!
I'm using the pattern [\d,.] for currency, but you can replace that with something more sophisticated, especially if you expect weird formats and currency symbols. The biggest potential pitfall here is if the ICGROUP,INC.MELBOURNE token might start with a number. Then you'll definitely need a more sophisticated currency pattern!

Answer 2

Here's what I've got (in php).
$string = "LEO'SFINEFOOD&WINEHARTWELLJune350.0735.00ICGROUP,INC.MELBOURNEJune5UNITEDSTATESDOLLARAUD50.07includesconversioncommissionofAUD1.469.96WOOLWORTHS3335CHADSTOCHADSTONE";
$cleaned = preg_replace("/^(LEO'SFINEFOOD&WINEHARTWELL)([A-Za-z]{3,9})(\.|\d)*/", "", $string);
echo $cleaned;
what it returns is: ICGROUP,INC.MELBOURNEJune5UNITEDSTATESDOLLARAUD50.07includesconversioncommissionofAUD1.469.96WOOLWORTHS3335CHADSTOCHADSTONE
Which you can then use and run your own little regex on.
Explanation:
The \w{3,9} is used to remove the month which may be 3-9 characters long. Then the (\.|\d)* is to remove the digits and dots. I'm thinking that we could parse the month/date better using your regex to extract that June 5 part but from your example given, it shouldn't be necessary.
However, it would be much more helpful if you could provide at least 3 examples, optimally 5, so we can get a good feel of the pattern. Otherwise this is the best I can do with what you've given.