Hey stackoverflow community. Ive need help with huge information file. Is it possible with regular expression to find in this tag:
<category_name><![CDATA[Prekiniai ženklai>Adler|Kita buitinė technika>Buičiai naudingi prietaisai|Kita buitinė technika>Lygintuvai]]></category_name>
Somehow replace all the other data and leave only 'Adler' or 'Lygintuvai'. Im using Altova to edit xml files, so i cant find other way then find-replace. And im new in the regex stuff. So i thought maby you can help me.
#\<category_name\>.+?gt\;([\w]+?)\|.+?gt;([\w]+?)\]\]\>\<\/category_name\>#i
\1 - Adler
\2 - Lygintuvai
PHP
regex101.com
Fields may contain alphanumeric characters without spaces.
If you want to modify the scope of acceptable characters change [\w] to something other:
[a-z] - only letters
[0-9] - only digits
etc.
It's possible, but use of regular expressions to process XML will never be 100% correct (you can prove that using computer science theory), and it may also be very inefficient. For example, the solution given by Luk is incorrect because it doesn't allow whitespace in places where XML allows it. Much better to use XQuery or XSLT, both of which are designed for the job (and both work in Altova). You can then use XPath expressions to locate the element or attribute nodes you are interested in, and you can still use regular expressions (e.g. in the XPath replace() function) to process the content of text or attribute nodes.
Incidentally, your input is rather strange because it uses escape sequences like > within a CDATA section; but XML escape sequences are not recognized in a CDATA section.
Related
This is my reg expression that find it
(<instance_material symbol="material_)([0-9]+)(part)(.*?)(")(/)(>)
I need to find a string that does not contain the word "part"
and the xml lines are
<instance_material symbol="material_677part01_h502_w5" target="#material_677part01_h502_w5"/>
<instance_material symbol="material_677" target="#material_677"/>
You can use negative lookahead
^(?!.*part).*?$
^ - start of string.
(?!.*part) - condition to avoid part.
.*? - Match anything except new line.
$ - End of string
Demo
Many regex starters will encounter the problem finding a string not containing certain words. You could find more useful tips on Regular-Expression.info.
^((?!part).)*$
You need to be aware that all attempts to process XML using regular expressions are wrong, in the sense that (a) there will be some legitimate ways of writing the XML document that the regex doesn't match, and (b) there will be some ways of getting false matches, e.g. by putting nasty stuff in XML comments. Sometimes being right 99% of the time is OK of course, but don't do this in production because soon we'll have people writing on SO "I need to generate XML with the attributes in a particular order because that's what the receiving application requires."
Your regex, for example, requires the attribute to be in double rather than single quotes, and it doesn't allow whitespace around the "=" sign, or in several other places where XML allows whitespace. If there's any risk of people deliberately trying to defeat your regex, you need to consider tricks like people writing p in place of p.
Even if this is a one-off with no risk of malicious subversion, you're much better off doing this with XPath. It then becomes a simple query like //instance_materal[#symbol[not(contains(., 'part'))]]
So I read a lot about Negation in Regex but can't solve my problem in MS Word 2016.
How do I exclude a String, Word, Number(s) from being found?
Example:
<[A-Z]{2}[A-Z0-9]{9;11}> to search a String like XY123BBT22223
But how to exclude for example a specefic one like SEDWS12WW04?
Well it depends on what you need to achieve or is this a matter of curiosity... RegEx is not the same as the built-in Advanced Find with Wildcards; for that you need VBA.
Depending on your need, without using VBA, you could make use of space and return characters - something like this will work for the strings provided: [ ^13][A-Z]{2}[0-9]{1,}[A-Z]{1,}[0-9]{1,}[ ^13] (assuming you use normal carriage returns and spaces in your document)
Anyway, this is a good article on wildcard searches in MS Word: https://wordmvp.com/FAQs/General/UsingWildcards.htm
EDIT:
In light of your further comments you will probably want to look at section 8 of the linked article which explains grouping. For my proposed search you can use this to your advantage by creating 3 groups in your 'find' and only modifying the middle group, if indeed you do intend to modify. Using groups the search would look something like:
([ ^13])([A-Z]{2}[0-9]{1,}[A-Z]{1,}[0-9]{1,})([ ^13])
and the replace might look like this:
\1 SOMETHING \3
Note also: compared to a RegEx solution my suggestion is kinda lame, mainly because compared to RegEx, MS-Words find and replace (good as it is, and really it is) is kinda lame... it's hacky but it might work for you (although you might need to do a few searches).
BUT... if it really is REGEX that you want, well you can get access to this via VBA: How to Use/Enable (RegExp object) Regular Expression using VBA (MACRO) in word
And... then you will be able to use proper RegEx for find and replace, well almost - I'm under the impression that the VBA RegEx still has some quirks...
As already noted by others, this is not possible in Microsoft Word's flavor of regular expressions.
Instead, you should use standard regular expressions. It is actually possible to use standard regular expressions in MS Word if you use a special tool that integrates into Microsoft Word called Multiple Find & Replace (see http://www.translatortools.net/products/transtoolsplus/word-multiplefindreplace). This tool opens as a pane to the right of the document window and works just like the Advanced Find & Replace dialog. However, in addition to Word's existing search functionality, it can use the standard regular expressions syntax to search and replace any text within a Word document.
In your particular case, I would use this:
\b[A-Z]{2}[A-Z0-9]{9,11}\b(?<!\bSEDWS12WW04)
To explain, this searches for a word boundary + ID + word boundary, and then it looks back to make sure that the preceding string does not match [word boundary + excluded ID]. In a similar vein, you can do something like
(?<!\bSEDWS12WW04|\bSEDWS12WW05|\bSEDWS12WW05)
to exlude several IDs.
Multiple Find & Replace is quite powerful: you can add any number of expressions (either using regular expressions or using Word's standard search syntax) to a list and then search the document for all of them, replace everything, display all matches in a list and replace only specific matches, and a few more things.
I created this tool for translators and editors, but it is great for any advanced search/replace operations in Word, and I am sure you will find it very useful.
Best regards, Stanislav
I'm working with load files and trying to write a regex that will check for any rows in the file that do not have the correct number of delimiters. Let's pretend the delimiter is % (I'm not sure this text field supports the delimiters that are in the load file). The regex I wrote that finds all rows that are correct is:
^%([^%]*%){20}$
Sometimes it's more beneficial to find any rows that do not have the correct number of delimiters, so to accomplish that, I wrote this:
(^%([^%]*%){0,19}$)|(^%([^%]*%){21,}$)
I'm concerned about the efficiency of this (and any regex I write in general), so I'm wondering if there's a better way to write it, or if the way I wrote it is fine. I thought maybe there would be some way to use alternation with the repetition tokens, such as:
{0,19}|{21,}
but that doesn't seem to work.
If it's helpful to know, I'm just searching through the files in Sublime Text, which I believe uses PCRE. I'm also open to suggestions for making the first regex better in general, although I've found it to work pretty well even in exceptionally large load files.
If your regex engine supports negative lookaheads, you can slightly modify your original regex.
^(?!%([^%]*%){20}$)
The regex above is useful for test only. If you want to capture, then you need to add .* part.
^(?!%([^%]*%){20}$).*$
I'm using the following regular expression to pull out some html:
(?i)(?:\<tr\s*class='list'[^\>]*\>)[^$+]*\</tr\>
Problem is its not segregating the TRs correctly. I'm trying to use $+ to reference the tag selector again to ensure that the contents of the match don't have the start tag again. Here is the sample html:
http://www.pastie.org/1311827
There are multiple <tr>s in some matches. Please help.
I don't know what you think [^$+]* means, but it defines a negated character class that matches zero or more times. In other words, it matches an empty string, or one or more characters that aren't a literal dollar sign or plus.
HTML cannot be trivially parsed by regex (unless it is known ahead of time what the structure will look like) because in order to properly parse a document you need to be able to recurse, as elements within the document can be nested within themselves (for instance a <div> can contain another <div>). While some languages (you didn't specify what you're using) support recursive regular expressions (perl and PHP for instance), it would likely be more efficient to use a proper DOM parser than recursive regex (the complexity of which non-withstanding) anyways!
Use document.getElementsByTagName in your favorite DOM library and iterate through the nodeList with a loop, then parse the getAttribute('class').
I suggest not using regex because it's only a matter of time before the regex breaks, unless you're dealing with very trivial markup, in addition DOM is just made for that purpose.
I'm fairly new to figuring out how Regex works, but this one is just frustrating.
I have a massive XML document with a lot of <description>blahblahblah</description> tags. I want to basically remove any and all instances of <description></description>.
I'm using Eclipse and have tried a few examples of Regex I've found online, but nothing works.
<description>(.*?)</description>
Shouldn't that work?
EDIT:
Here is the actual code.
<description><![CDATA[<center><table><tr><th colspan='2' align='center'><em>Attributes</em></th></tr><tr bgcolor="#E3E3F3"><th>ID</th><td>308</td></tr></table></center>]]></description>
I'm not familiar with Eclipse, but I would expect its regex search facility to use Java's built-in regex flavor. You probably just need to check a box labeled "DOTALL" or "single-line" or something similar, or you can add the corresponding inline modifier to the regex:
(?s)<description>(.*?)</description>
That will allow the . to match newlines, which it doesn't by default.
EDIT: This is assuming there are newlines within the <description> element, which is the only reason I can think of why your regex wouldn't work. I'm also assuming you really are doing a regex search; is that automatic in Eclipse, or do you have to choose between regex and literal searching?