Replace at every 5th semicolon - regex

I was wondering if i'ts possible to use hive's regexp_replace at every nth in my case I would like to replace every 5th semicolon with pipe
example of column data:
test;vid;1;;1.45;id:3;manlyman;2;4;;
So there would be 2 replaces in this one. This can't be a static replace because some times the column data will have only 5 or sometimes 15.

Use String.replaceAll() with the pattern mentioned by #bobble Bubble :
int nth = 5;
String input ="test;vid;1;;1.45;id:3;manlyman;2;4;;";
System.out.println(input.replaceAll("(([^;]*;){"+(nth-1)+"}[^;]*);", "$1|"));
Output:
test;vid;1;;1.45|id:3;manlyman;2;4;|

Related

Extract text up to the Nth character in a string

How can I extract the text up to the 4th instance of a character in a column?
I'm selecting text out of a column called filter_type up to the fourth > character.
To accomplish this, I've been trying to find the position of the fourth > character, but it's not working:
select substring(filter_type from 1 for position('>' in filter_type))
You can use the pattern matching function in Postgres.
First figure out a pattern to capture everything up to the fourth > character.
To start your pattern you should create a sub-group that captures non > characters, and one > character:
([^>]*>)
Then capture that four times to get to the fourth instance of >
([^>]*>){4}
Then, you will need to wrap that in a group so that the match brings back all four instances:
(([^>]*>){4})
and put a start of string symbol for good measure to make sure it only matches from the beginning of the String (not in the middle):
^(([^>]*>){4})
Here's a working regex101 example of that!
Once you have the pattern that will return what you want in the first group element (which you can tell at the online regex on the right side panel), you need to select it back in the SQL.
In Postgres, the substring function has an option to use a regex pattern to extract text out of the input using a 'from' statement in the substring.
To finish, put it all together!
select substring(filter_type from '^(([^>]*>){4})')
from filter_table
See a working sqlfiddle here
If you want to match the entire string whenever there are less than four instances of >, use this regular expression:
^(([^>]*>){4}|.*)
You can also use a simple, non-regex solution:
SELECT array_to_string((string_to_array(filter_type, '>'))[1:4], '>')
The above query:
splits your string into an array, using '>' as delimeter
selects only the first 4 elements
transforms the array back to a string
substring(filter_type from '^(([^>]*>){4})')
This form of substring lets you extract the portion of a string that matches a regex pattern.
You can also split the string, then choose the N'th element inside the result list. For example:
SELECT SPLIT_PART('aa,bb,cc', ',', 2)
will return: bb.
This function is defined as:
SPLIT_PART(string, delimiter, position)
In order to look at this problem, I did the following (all of the code below is available on the fiddle here):
CREATE TABLE s
(
a TEXT
);
I then created a PL/pgSQL function to generate random strings as follows.
CREATE FUNCTION f() RETURNS TEXT LANGUAGE SQL AS
$$
SELECT STRING_AGG(SUBSTR('abcdef>', CEIL(RANDOM() * 7)::INTEGER, 1), '')
FROM GENERATE_SERIES(1, 40)
$$;
I got the code from here and modified it so that it would produce strings with lots of > characters for testing purposes.
I then manually inserted a few strings at the beginning so that a quick look would tell me if the code was working as anticipated.
INSERT INTO s VALUES
('afsad>adfsaf>asfasf>afasdX>asdffs>asfdf>'),
('23433>433453>4>4559>455>3433>'),
('adfd>adafs>afadsf>'), -- only 3 '>'s!
('babedacfab>feaefbf>fedabbcbbcdcfefefcfcd'),
('e>>>>>'), -- edge case - multiple terminal '>'s
('aaaaaaa'); -- edge case - no '>'s whatsoever
The reason I put in the records with fewer than 4 >s is because the accepted answer (see discussion at the end of this answer) puts forward a solution which should return the entire string if this is the case!
On the fiddle, I then added 50,000 records as follows:
INSERT INTO s
SELECT f() FROM GENERATE_SERIES(1, 50000);
I also created a table s on a home laptop (16GB RAM, 500MB NVMe SSD) and populated it with 40,000,000 (50M) records - times also shown.
Now, my reading of the question is that we need to extract the string up to but not including the 4th > character.
The first solution (from treecon) was this one (I also show them running on the fiddle, but to save space here, I've only included the partial output of EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS, VERBOSE)) - the times shown are typical over a few runs:
EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS, VERBOSE)
SELECT
ARRAY_TO_STRING((STRING_TO_ARRAY(a, '>'))[1:4], '>'),
a
FROM s;
Result (only key parts included):
Seq Scan on public.s
Execution Time: 81.807 ms
40M Time: 46 seconds
A regex solution which works (significantly faster):
EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS, VERBOSE)
SELECT
SUBSTRING(a FROM '^(?:[^>]*>){0,3}[^>]*'),
a
FROM s;
Result:
Seq Scan on public.s
Execution Time: 74.757 ms
40M Time: 32 seconds
The accepted answer fails on many levels (see the fiddle). It leaves a > at the end and fails on various strings even when modified. Also, the solution proposed to include strings with fewer than 4 >s (i.e. ^(([^>]*>){4}|.*)) merely returns the original string (see end of fiddle).

How do you select specific range in a string using RegEx

So I have a string. Let's say for the argument it is this one:
1234567891113SomeTextExample
I want to have two regular expresions:
Select from beginning to, say, 6th position;
Select from 8th position to 12th position.
I know how to select everything AFTER specific position, e.g.:
(?<=.{6})(.*)$
would select everything after 5 characters.
I am using Sublime Text editor and need to cleanup some logs and these two expressions would save a whole lot of time.
use ^ to get your regex to start at the beginning.
Beginning to 6th position : ^(.{6})
var str = 'xdcfvgbhdsds';
var regex = /^(.{6})/;
console.log(regex.exec(str)[1]);
8th to 12th position : ^.{7}(.{5})
var str = 'xdcfvgbhddsfsffsds';
var regex = /^.{7}(.{5})/;
console.log(regex.exec(str)[1]);
Beginning to 6th position (Demo):
^(.{6}).*$
Characters 8 to 12, inclusive on both ends (Demo):
^.{7}(.{5}).*$
I am assuming here that you want to capture these specific ranges for some sort of use.
Finally I found it out.
First one - Select from beginning to, say, 6th position:
^(.{6})
Thanks Zenoo for this.
And select from 8th position to 12th position:
^(.{8})|(?<=.{12})(.*)$
Well, at least this one works in Sublime Text. I am sure there are lots and lots of editors/applications which are fine with Zenoo's approach (^.{7}(.{5})).

Find group of strings starting and ending by a character using regular expression

I have a string, and I want to extract, using regular expressions, groups of characters that are between the character : and the other character /.
typically, here is a string example I'm getting:
'abcd:45.72643,4.91203/Rou:hereanotherdata/defgh'
and so, I want to retrieved, 45.72643,4.91203 and also hereanotherdata
As they are both between characters : and /.
I tried with this syntax in a easier string where there is only 1 time the pattern,
[tt]=regexp(str,':(\w.*)/','match')
tt = ':45.72643,4.91203/'
but it works only if the pattern happens once. If I use it in string containing multiples times the pattern, I get all the string between the first : and the last /.
How can I mention that the pattern will occur multiple time, and how can I retrieve it?
Use lookaround and a lazy quantifier:
regexp(str, '(?<=:).+?(?=/)', 'match')
Example (Matlab R2016b):
>> str = 'abcd:45.72643,4.91203/Rou:hereanotherdata/defgh';
>> result = regexp(str, '(?<=:).+?(?=/)', 'match')
result =
1×2 cell array
'45.72643,4.91203' 'hereanotherdata'
In most languages this is hard to do with a single regexp. Ultimately you'll only ever get back the one string, and you want to get back multiple strings.
I've never used Matlab, so it may be possible in that language, but based on other languages, this is how I'd approach it...
I can't give you the exact code, but a search indicates that in Matlab there is a function called strsplit, example...
C = strsplit(data,':')
That should will break your original string up into an array of strings, using the ":" as the break point. You can then ignore the first array index (as it contains text before a ":"), loop the rest of the array and regexp to extract everything that comes before a "/".
So for instance...
'abcd:45.72643,4.91203/Rou:hereanotherdata/defgh'
Breaks down into an array with parts...
1 - 'abcd'
2 - '45.72643,4.91203/Rou'
3 - 'hereanotherdata/defgh'
Then Ignore 1, and extract everything before the "/" in 2 and 3.
As John Mawer and Adriaan mentioned, strsplit is a good place to start with. You can use it for both ':' and '/', but then you will not be able to determine where each of them started. If you do it with strsplit twice, you can know where the ':' starts :
A='abcd:45.72643,4.91203/Rou:hereanotherdata/defgh';
B=cellfun(#(x) strsplit(x,'/'),strsplit(A,':'),'uniformoutput',0);
Now B has cells that start with ':', and has two cells in each cell that contain '/' also. You can extract it with checking where B has more than one cell, and take the first of each of them:
C=cellfun(#(x) x{1},B(cellfun('length',B)>1),'uniformoutput',0)
C =
1×2 cell array
'45.72643,4.91203' 'hereanotherdata'
Starting in 16b you can use extractBetween:
>> str = 'abcd:45.72643,4.91203/Rou:hereanotherdata/defgh';
>> result = extractBetween(str,':','/')
result =
2×1 cell array
{'45.72643,4.91203'}
{'hereanotherdata' }
If all your text elements have the same number of delimiters this can be vectorized too.

Spotfire: count the number of a certain character in a string

I am trying to add a new calculated column that counts the number of semi colons in a string and adds one to it. So the column i have contains a bunch of aliases and I need to know how many for each row.
For example,
A; B; C; D
So basically this means there are 4 aliases (3 semi colons + 1)
Need to do this for over 2 million rows. Help please!
Basic idea is to subtract length of your string without ; characters from it's original length:
len([columnName])-len(Substitute([columnName],";",""))+1
Here it is with a regular expression:
Len(RXReplace([Column 1], "(?!;).", "", "gis"))+1
RXReplace takes as arguments:
The string you are wanting to work on (in this case it is on Column 1)
The regular expression you want to use (here it is (?!;). )
What you want to replace matches with (blank in this situation so
that everything that matches the regex is removed)
Finally a parameter saying how you want it to work (we are passing
in gis which means replace all matches not just the first, ignore case, replace newlines)
We wrap this in a Len which gives us the amount of semicolons since that is all that is left and finally we add 1 to it to get the final result.
You can read more about the regular expression here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/az24scfc(v=vs.110).aspx but in a nutshell it says match everything that isn't a semi colon.
You can read more about RXReplace and Len here: https://docs.tibco.com/pub/spotfire/6.0.0-november-2013/userguide-webhelp/ncfe/ncfe_text_functions.htm

Python re find index position of first search match

I have a series of strings, most of which contain 4 digits in a row. I want to slice the string at the end of that fourth digit, using Python. Sometimes the string contains more than one such pattern. What I want is the index position of the FIRST match of my regular expression. What I have been able to get is the LAST match.
myString = 'Today is June 14, 2019. I sometimes like to think back when I was a child in 1730.'
theYear = re.compile("\d{4}")
[(m.start(0), m.end(0)) for m in re.finditer(theYear, myString)]
print m.span(0)
The result is (77, 81), which is the index position for the second date, not the first one. I know the problem is my loop, which will iterate through all of the matches, leaving me with the last one. But I havn't been able to figure out how to access those index positions without looping.
Thanks for any help.
print theYear.search(myString).span()