I'm trying to get the list of all digits preceding a hyphen in a given string (let's say in cell A1), using a Google Sheets regex formula :
=REGEXEXTRACT(A1, "\d-")
My problem is that it only returns the first match... how can I get all matches?
Example text:
"A1-Nutrition;A2-ActPhysiq;A2-BioMeta;A2-Patho-jour;A2-StgMrktg2;H2-Bioth2/EtudeCas;H2-Bioth2/Gemmo;H2-Bioth2/Oligo;H2-Bioth2/Opo;H2-Bioth2/Organo;H3-Endocrino;H3-Génétiq"
My formula returns 1-, whereas I want to get 1-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-3-3- (either as an array or concatenated text).
I know I could use a script or another function (like SPLIT) to achieve the desired result, but what I really want to know is how I could get a re2 regular expression to return such multiple matches in a "REGEX.*" Google Sheets formula.
Something like the "global - Don't return after first match" option on regex101.com
I've also tried removing the undesired text with REGEXREPLACE, with no success either (I couldn't get rid of other digits not preceding a hyphen).
Any help appreciated!
Thanks :)
You can actually do this in a single formula using regexreplace to surround all the values with a capture group instead of replacing the text:
=join("",REGEXEXTRACT(A1,REGEXREPLACE(A1,"(\d-)","($1)")))
basically what it does is surround all instances of the \d- with a "capture group" then using regex extract, it neatly returns all the captures. if you want to join it back into a single string you can just use join to pack it back into a single cell:
You may create your own custom function in the Script Editor:
function ExtractAllRegex(input, pattern,groupId) {
return [Array.from(input.matchAll(new RegExp(pattern,'g')), x=>x[groupId])];
}
Or, if you need to return all matches in a single cell joined with some separator:
function ExtractAllRegex(input, pattern,groupId,separator) {
return Array.from(input.matchAll(new RegExp(pattern,'g')), x=>x[groupId]).join(separator);
}
Then, just call it like =ExtractAllRegex(A1, "\d-", 0, ", ").
Description:
input - current cell value
pattern - regex pattern
groupId - Capturing group ID you want to extract
separator - text used to join the matched results.
Edit
I came up with more general solution:
=regexreplace(A1,"(.)?(\d-)|(.)","$2")
It replaces any text except the second group match (\d-) with just the second group $2.
"(.)?(\d-)|(.)"
1 2 3
Groups are in ()
---------------------------------------
"$2" -- means return the group number 2
Learn regular expressions: https://regexone.com
Try this formula:
=regexreplace(regexreplace(A1,"[^\-0-9]",""),"(\d-)|(.)","$1")
It will handle string like this:
"A1-Nutrition;A2-ActPhysiq;A2-BioM---eta;A2-PH3-Généti***566*9q"
with output:
1-2-2-2-3-
I wasn't able to get the accepted answer to work for my case. I'd like to do it that way, but needed a quick solution and went with the following:
Input:
1111 days, 123 hours 1234 minutes and 121 seconds
Expected output:
1111 123 1234 121
Formula:
=split(REGEXREPLACE(C26,"[a-z,]"," ")," ")
The shortest possible regex:
=regexreplace(A1,".?(\d-)|.", "$1")
Which returns 1-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-3-3- for "A1-Nutrition;A2-ActPhysiq;A2-BioMeta;A2-Patho-jour;A2-StgMrktg2;H2-Bioth2/EtudeCas;H2-Bioth2/Gemmo;H2-Bioth2/Oligo;H2-Bioth2/Opo;H2-Bioth2/Organo;H3-Endocrino;H3-Génétiq".
Explanation of regex:
.? -- optional character
(\d-) -- capture group 1 with a digit followed by a dash (specify (\d+-) multiple digits)
| -- logical or
. -- any character
the replacement "$1" uses just the capture group 1, and discards anything else
Learn more about regex: https://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/TWikiPresentation2018x10x14Regex
This seems to work and I have tried to verify it.
The logic is
(1) Replace letter followed by hyphen with nothing
(2) Replace any digit not followed by a hyphen with nothing
(3) Replace everything which is not a digit or hyphen with nothing
=regexreplace(A1,"[a-zA-Z]-|[0-9][^-]|[a-zA-Z;/é]","")
Result
1-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-3-3-
Analysis
I had to step through these procedurally to convince myself that this was correct. According to this reference when there are alternatives separated by the pipe symbol, regex should match them in order left-to-right. The above formula doesn't work properly unless rule 1 comes first (otherwise it reduces all characters except a digit or hyphen to null before rule (1) can come into play and you get an extra hyphen from "Patho-jour").
Here are some examples of how I think it must deal with the text
The solution to capture groups with RegexReplace and then do the RegexExctract works here too, but there is a catch.
=join("",REGEXEXTRACT(A1,REGEXREPLACE(A1,"(\d-)","($1)")))
If the cell that you are trying to get the values has Special Characters like parentheses "(" or question mark "?" the solution provided won´t work.
In my case, I was trying to list all “variables text” contained in the cell. Those “variables text “ was wrote inside like that: “{example_name}”. But the full content of the cell had special characters making the regex formula do break. When I removed theses specials characters, then I could list all captured groups like the solution did.
There are two general ('Excel' / 'native' / non-Apps Script) solutions to return an array of regex matches in the style of REGEXEXTRACT:
Method 1)
insert a delimiter around matches, remove junk, and call SPLIT
Regexes work by iterating over the string from left to right, and 'consuming'. If we are careful to consume junk values, we can throw them away.
(This gets around the problem faced by the currently accepted solution, which is that as Carlos Eduardo Oliveira mentions, it will obviously fail if the corpus text contains special regex characters.)
First we pick a delimiter, which must not already exist in the text. The proper way to do this is to parse the text to temporarily replace our delimiter with a "temporary delimiter", like if we were going to use commas "," we'd first replace all existing commas with something like "<<QUOTED-COMMA>>" then un-replace them later. BUT, for simplicity's sake, we'll just grab a random character such as from the private-use unicode blocks and use it as our special delimiter (note that it is 2 bytes... google spreadsheets might not count bytes in graphemes in a consistent way, but we'll be careful later).
=SPLIT(
LAMBDA(temp,
MID(temp, 1, LEN(temp)-LEN(""))
)(
REGEXREPLACE(
"xyzSixSpaces:[ ]123ThreeSpaces:[ ]aaaa 12345",".*?( |$)",
"$1"
)
),
""
)
We just use a lambda to define temp="match1match2match3", then use that to remove the last delimiter into "match1match2match3", then SPLIT it.
Taking COLUMNS of the result will prove that the correct result is returned, i.e. {" ", " ", " "}.
This is a particularly good function to turn into a Named Function, and call it something like REGEXGLOBALEXTRACT(text,regex) or REGEXALLEXTRACT(text,regex), e.g.:
=SPLIT(
LAMBDA(temp,
MID(temp, 1, LEN(temp)-LEN(""))
)(
REGEXREPLACE(
text,
".*?("®ex&"|$)",
"$1"
)
),
""
)
Method 2)
use recursion
With LAMBDA (i.e. lets you define a function like any other programming language), you can use some tricks from the well-studied lambda calculus and function programming: you have access to recursion. Defining a recursive function is confusing because there's no easy way for it to refer to itself, so you have to use a trick/convention:
trick for recursive functions: to actually define a function f which needs to refer to itself, instead define a function that takes a parameter of itself and returns the function you actually want; pass in this 'convention' to the Y-combinator to turn it into an actual recursive function
The plumbing which takes such a function work is called the Y-combinator. Here is a good article to understand it if you have some programming background.
For example to get the result of 5! (5 factorial, i.e. implement our own FACT(5)), we could define:
Named Function Y(f)=LAMBDA(f, (LAMBDA(x,x(x)))( LAMBDA(x, f(LAMBDA(y, x(x)(y)))) ) ) (this is the Y-combinator and is magic; you don't have to understand it to use it)
Named Function MY_FACTORIAL(n)=
Y(LAMBDA(self,
LAMBDA(n,
IF(n=0, 1, n*self(n-1))
)
))
result of MY_FACTORIAL(5): 120
The Y-combinator makes writing recursive functions look relatively easy, like an introduction to programming class. I'm using Named Functions for clarity, but you could just dump it all together at the expense of sanity...
=LAMBDA(Y,
Y(LAMBDA(self, LAMBDA(n, IF(n=0,1,n*self(n-1))) ))(5)
)(
LAMBDA(f, (LAMBDA(x,x(x)))( LAMBDA(x, f(LAMBDA(y, x(x)(y)))) ) )
)
How does this apply to the problem at hand? Well a recursive solution is as follows:
in pseudocode below, I use 'function' instead of LAMBDA, but it's the same thing:
// code to get around the fact that you can't have 0-length arrays
function emptyList() {
return {"ignore this value"}
}
function listToArray(myList) {
return OFFSET(myList,0,1)
}
function allMatches(text, regex) {
allMatchesHelper(emptyList(), text, regex)
}
function allMatchesHelper(resultsToReturn, text, regex) {
currentMatch = REGEXEXTRACT(...)
if (currentMatch succeeds) {
textWithoutMatch = SUBSTITUTE(text, currentMatch, "", 1)
return allMatches(
{resultsToReturn,currentMatch},
textWithoutMatch,
regex
)
} else {
return listToArray(resultsToReturn)
}
}
Unfortunately, the recursive approach is quadratic order of growth (because it's appending the results over and over to itself, while recreating the giant search string with smaller and smaller bites taken out of it, so 1+2+3+4+5+... = big^2, which can add up to a lot of time), so may be slow if you have many many matches. It's better to stay inside the regex engine for speed, since it's probably highly optimized.
You could of course avoid using Named Functions by doing temporary bindings with LAMBDA(varName, expr)(varValue) if you want to use varName in an expression. (You can define this pattern as a Named Function =cont(varValue) to invert the order of the parameters to keep code cleaner, or not.)
Whenever I use varName = varValue, write that instead.
to see if a match succeeds, use ISNA(...)
It would look something like:
Named Function allMatches(resultsToReturn, text, regex):
UNTESTED:
LAMBDA(helper,
OFFSET(
helper({"ignore"}, text, regex),
0,1)
)(
Y(LAMBDA(helperItself,
LAMBDA(results, partialText,
LAMBDA(currentMatch,
IF(ISNA(currentMatch),
results,
LAMBDA(textWithoutMatch,
helperItself({results,currentMatch}, textWithoutMatch)
)(
SUBSTITUTE(partialText, currentMatch, "", 1)
)
)
)(
REGEXEXTRACT(partialText, regex)
)
)
))
)
I'm trying to display text which may at times contain a math expression so I am using MTMathUILabel from iosMath. I generate the labels dynamically and add them to a stack as I pull the strings from the db. The problem is that all text which is not math appears with no spaces. i.e:
In db: Solve the following equation: (math here)
In label: Solvethefollowingequation: (math here)
Here is what I have tried so far:
for question in all_questions {
let finalString = question.question?.replacingOccurrences(of: " ", with: "\\space", options: .literal, range: nil)
let label = MTMathUILabel()
label.textColor = UIColor.black
label.latex = finalString
stack.addArrangedSubview(label)
}
But the problem is that it literally places two . And xcode doesn't let me write just one \ because it is not escaped. However if I just write
print("\\space")
Then it will print just one.
How can I fix this so I add only one \? If this cannot be done, how can I achieve what I want? Is there a better library out there?
After giving a quick look at MTMathUILabel's doc and LaTeX conventions, I believe you should replace your spaces with a tilde character "~". This will make them non-breaking spaces and avoid the backslash issue (which is probably due to \space not being understood by MTMathUILabel).
Systematic replacement of all spaces may yield undesirable result if the formula itself has legitimate spaces in it.
For example, a quadratic equation would be expressed as:
x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}
You will end up replacing spaces inside curly braces, and that may or may not be what you want:
x~=~\frac{-b~\pm~\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}
In data frame df column c1 has negative numerical values formatted like this:
(1,000,000)
I would like to remove the parentheses from the negative values in df$c1, so as to return:
-1,000,000
I am using the following command in R: df$c1<-gsub('^\\($','-',gsub(',','',df$c1))
But the output is not returning the desired effect.
How can I adjust the regular expression in this R command to return the proper formatting?
gsub("\\((.+)\\)", "-\\1", "(1,000,000)")
# [1] "-1,000,000"
Wouldn't it instead be:
df$c1<-sub('^\\(', '-' , sub('\\)$','',df$c1))
This removes leading left-parens, replacing them with minus signs, and removes trailing right-parens. Your version was insisting that the 'outer' pattern be exactly (, which I doubt would match any items, and was removing commas using the 'inner' call. I changed to sub since there was only the desire to do this once for each element.
I need to use RegEx to run through a string of text but only return that parts that I need. Let's say for example the string is as follows:
1234,Weapon Types,100,Handgun,"This is the text, "and", that is all."""
\d*,Weapon Types,(\d*),(\w+), gets me most of the way, however it is the last part that I am having an issue with. Is there a way for me to capture the rest of the string i.e.
"This is the text, "and", that is all."""
without picking up the quotes? I've tried negating them, however it just stops the string at the quote.
Please keep in mind that the text for this string is unknown so doing literal matches will not work.
You've given us something very difficult to solve. It's okay that you have nested commas inside your string. Once we come across a double-quote, we can ignore everything until the end quote. This would gooble up commas.
But how will your parser know that the next double-quote isn't ending the string. How does it know that it a nested double-quote?
If I could slightly modify your input string to make it clear what is a nested quote, then parsing is easy...
var txt = "1234,Weapon Types,100,Handgun,\"This is the text, "and", that is all.\",other stuff";
var m = Regex.Match(txt, #"^\d*,Weapon Types,(\d*),(\w+),""([^""]+)""");
MessageBox.Show(m.Groups[3].Value);
But if your input string must have nested quotes like that, then we must come up with some other rule for detecting what is the real end of the string. How about this?
var txt = "1234,Weapon Types,100,Handgun,\"This is the text, \"and\", that is all.\",other stuff";
var m = Regex.Match(txt, #"^\d*,Weapon Types,(\d*),(\w+),""(.+)"",");
MessageBox.Show(m.Groups[3].Value);
The result is...
This is the text, "and", that is all.
Can anyone help me with a regex to turn:
filename_author
to
author_filename
I am using MS Word 2003 and am trying to do this with Word's Find-and-Replace. I've tried the use wildcards feature but haven't had any luck.
Am I only going to be able to do it programmatically?
Here is the regex:
([^_]*)_(.*)
And here is a C# example:
using System;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
class Program
{
static void Main()
{
String test = "filename_author";
String result = Regex.Replace(test, #"([^_]*)_(.*)", "$2_$1");
}
}
Here is a Python example:
from re import sub
test = "filename_author";
result = sub('([^_]*)_(.*)', r'\2_\1', test)
Edit: In order to do this in Microsoft Word using wildcards use this as a search string:
(<*>)_(<*>)
and replace with this:
\2_\1
Also, please see Add power to Word searches with regular expressions for an explanation of the syntax I have used above:
The asterisk (*) returns all the text in the word.
The less than and greater than symbols (< >) mark the start and end
of each word, respectively. They
ensure that the search returns a
single word.
The parentheses and the space between them divide the words into
distinct groups: (first word) (second
word). The parentheses also indicate
the order in which you want search to
evaluate each expression.
Here you go:
s/^([a-zA-Z]+)_([a-zA-Z]+)$/\2_\1/
Depending on the context, that might be a little greedy.
Search pattern:
([^_]+)_(.+)
Replacement pattern:
$2_$1
In .NET you could use ([^_]+)_([^_]+) as the regex and then $2_$1 as the substitution pattern, for this very specific type of case. If you need more than 2 parts it gets a lot more complicated.
Since you're in MS Word, you might try a non-programming approach. Highlight all of the text, select Table -> Convert -> Text to Table. Set the number of columns at 2. Choose Separate Text At, select the Other radio, and enter an _. That will give you a table. Switch the two columns. Then convert the table back to text using the _ again.
Or you could copy the whole thing to Excel, construct a formula to split and rejoin the text and then copy and paste that back to Word. Either would work.
In C# you could also do something like this.
string[] parts = "filename_author".Split('_');
return parts[1] + "_" + parts[0];
You asked about regex of course, but this might be a good alternative.