I'm attempting to block a long string of unnecessary text that's on every page of a document.
Ex: "36075 This is another page and this is the date March 4 2013"
I know this must be very simple, but I'm hoping there is a way to block text verbatim. Is the only way to block this text by using a lot of /d/s/w+/+ etc or is there is a way to say, "match 36075 This is another page and this is the date March 4 2013".
This would be SO HELPFUL to know. Thank you for helping!
From what you wrote I assume you need to get leading numbers from string, to do it you just need to use this pattern: ^\d+ which from this input:
36075 This is another page and this is the date March 4 2013
will return this:
36075
For future, in case of such questions please provide example string and expected output. As well as what you have tried.
I realized the issue I was having. I didn't need to use RegEx. The program I was using has the functionality to match specific words or groups of words and pronounce them differently. What I discovered is that it will not match the words unless the word groups are input exactly the way the program typically reads them.
Ergo --> The channel saw
the end of the British hold over
Would have to be listed as one group for, "The channel saw" and a second group for "the end of the British hold over"
In addition, there were some numbers --> 11960_30_o_ho_
and if the program naturally read 119 and then 60_3 and then _o_ho_ then three strings would need to be input for each section.
A few frustrating hours later, problem solved :) Thank you for your assistance.
Related
I have been trying to create a parser for Law texts.
I need to find a way to find "external links" like : art. 45 alin. (1) din Lege nr. 54/2000
But the problem is that my country law writing style is so, soooo lacking uniformity and that means sometimes the links might look like this : articolul 45 alineatul (1) din Legeea nr. 30/2000
The fact that my language has forms for words for days. (articol, articolului, articolelor....)
That means that i need to generalize that first thing... (art.) as to catch as many forms as possible and pray that the last thing is a law number & year (54/2000).
Now here comes the hard part... The problem is that every section that starts with Articol N starts the regex and it goes on and on until it finds a law number & year that have absolutely no relation between them.
This is how it looks \b(((A|a)rt.*?) \(?\d*?\)??)( \w*? )*?nr\.? (\d+\/\d\d\d\d|\d+\/\d\d\d\d)\b
My question is there a way to limit the words between the two capturing groups?
Link to a Docs to determine what should pass and what not:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vn2HwYaCq8UB1felY1GvfmbTI2w8o5RgW4efD9fsvQM/edit?usp=sharing
As Cary and James answered in comments above, I used (?:\S+\s*){0,15}. I used \S instead of \w to include punctuation and thus, abbreviated forms of the names of the Law (e.g. Const. for Constitution). That was the reason why my original regex wasn't working even when using {m,n}.
First off, I'm sorry if this has already been asked somewhere else, it's just I could not find it. If it has been, I apologize deeply.
I am terrible at Regular Expressions and generally avoid them but I know the problem I have can be simply solved using them so I have come here for help.
I have a text field containing some information about a company (name, address, identifier, etc), but not all information always appears on the field and the order the information appears in is not set.
What I need is the company identifier which is a 14-digit number which can or cannot be formatted as such: XX.XXX.XXX/XXXX-XX
What expression could I use that would identify if there are either 14 digits in a row or the number formatted in the manner described above?
/[0-9]{2}[.]{1}[0-9]{3}[.]{1}[0-9]{3}[\/]{1}[0-9]{4}[-]{1}[0-9]{2}/ for XX.XXX.XXX/XXXX-XX
/[0-9]{14}/ for 14 digits
There's probably some edge cases in here somewhere.
There's also probably a way to do both of these in one, but I don't have the patience nor the time to try and figure it out.
Try Regex: \b(?:\d{14}|\d{2}\.\d{3}\.\d{3}\/\d{4}-\d{2})\b
Demo
I'm trying to extract regions around keywords from longer passages of text. They should include complete sentences, based on the following conditions:
n=250 Charactars before / after keyword should be included if existing (the keyword can be closer then this to the start / end of the text)
from there it should expand further to include the complete sentence (let's assume here we can define sentence borders with ".?! or :" knowing it's not completely accurate)
I already achieved the expanding to the end of the last sentence, but not to start of the first in the following example, where vitamin is the keyword and the italic is captured by the regex. However, it should capture from "An extra 24 hours..."
Apparently I don't get the corresponding group up front, neither using lazy nor using lookbehind.
((.{0,250}(vitamin)\b.{0,250})(.+?(\.|\!|\?|\:))?)/ig
Well, this year you’re getting an extra day to get ahead on your taxes or (finally) clean out the garage. (Hey, we’re not trying to tell you what do but you might as well be productive.) February 29 is back on the calendar this year because it’s a leap year. Whether you love or loathe the extra winter day, you’re probably wondering why it happens in the first place. An extra 24 hours — or day — is built into the calen dar every four years to ensure it aligns with the Earth’s movement around the sun. There’s 365 days in a calendar year, but it actually takes longer for the Earth’s annual journey — about 365.2421 days — around the star that gives us light, life and vitamin D. The difference may seem like no big deal to us, but over time, it adds up. “To ensure consistency with the true astronomical year, it is necessary to periodically add in an extra day to make up the lost time and get the calendar back in sync with the heavens,” according the history. com.
Acknowledgement of the need for a leap year happened around the time of Julius Caesar. In 46 B.C., Caesar enlisted the help of astronomer Sosigenes to update the calendar so that it had 12 months and 365 days, including a leap year every four years.,
You can try something like this:
(([.?!:][^.?!:]*.{250}\bvitamin\b.{250})[^.?!:]*[.?!:])
It works by consuming 250 characters of text before and after the keyword "vitamin". From that point it finds the first punctuation point (.?!:) before/after the 250 characters of text.
Here's a sample of it in action.
You can you use extra parentheses () to strategically group what exact output you want. For example, the above answer includes the ending period from the preceding sentence in the output. So you could use
(([.?!:]([^.?!:]*.{250}\bvitamin\b.{250})[^.?!:]*[.?!:]))
and use group 3 from the result set which doesn't have this ending period.
I do not see how the specification in the question can be matched by a regex. It boils down to the following logic problem:
to match as many characters as possible but no more than 250 before/after the keyword, .{0,250} needs to be greedy and can neither be lazy .{0,250}? nor possessive .{0,250}+
if this part is greedy, you will miss the occurrences of the keyword that start before the .{0,250} part is matched.
The same logic applies to my understanding to the 'match back to the start of the sentnence as well.
I played around with the following more or less meaningful regex:
[.?!:]?([^.?!:]*?(.{0,250}\byear\b.{0,250})[^.?!:]*[.?!:]?) misses first 'year'
[.?!:]?([^.?!:]*?(.{0,250}?\byear\b.{0,250})[^.?!:]*[.?!:]?) gets the first 'year' but fails on others.
I suggest you write your on extraction logic in a function, eihter using regex or not, to achieve the extraction you want.
You could for example find the index of the start of the keyword \bkeyword\b and the full stops (\.[^\d]|[.?!:]$) and then with this information extract the part of the text you want.
I'm trying to do a search within a visual block, (from a vimscript).
This is my code:
aaaaaaaaaaaa
a26 text tea
atext text a
atext 27 12a
a11 text 25a
aaaaaaaaaaaa
Let say my block selection is within the 'a' border and I want to search all numbers with 2 characters:
This is my search:
/\%V\d\{2}\%V
The problem with the 2nd \%V is that it shortened a visual block selection with 1 characters, it doesn't find the number 12 and 25 in my above example.
How can I extend the visual block selection (in a vimscript) with 1 character to the right, do the search and return to previous visual block selection?
OK, then I just write it as an answer, well this is an answer and question...:)
remove the 2nd \%V from your pattern would do this.
I posted first as comment, because.....
I personally have been using only single \%V in my work, and it worked fine. I saw this question, and checked the :h \%V, the help suggests using both... and it is zero-width. I don't really get why 2 \%Vs won't work for OP's question.
so, that is to say, I know how to fix the problem, but not 100% clear, what causes the problem, I hope others could explain a bit.
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.