I have particular text that looks like the following:
CLIA ID:
Rapid Strep Test w/reflex culture
My regex to grab "Rapid Strep Test w/reflex culture"
looks like this
(?<=CLIA\s*ID:\s*\n)[a-zA-Z_0-9 /]{1,30}
here is my problem, my program actually grabs the text and then using the text it renames the input file with what it grabbed. The bad thing is the sending system cannot NOT send the / and as we all know I cannot name a file with a slash in it in Windows. Is there a way for me to grab the first 30 characters and if it finds / anywhere to replace it with a space?? I would even be ok with a REGEX where it finds the / to keep it in the capture, but exclude it in the output so end results would be something like
Rapid Strep Test wreflex culture
(30 characters max as i have of course). but ultimately i would like it to output
Rapid Strep Test w reflex culture
any thoughts please?
"In theoretical computer science and formal language theory, a regular expression (abbreviated regex or regexp) is a sequence of characters that forms a search pattern, mainly for use in pattern matching with strings, or string matching" - Wikipedia, Regular Expressions
I don't think that doing this using just Regex is possible.
If you are using .NET, you can use the String replace method to replace all occurrences of a substring with a different substring. This is probably what you are looking for.
Here's a small try for a solution in JavaScript using a callback function. The same approach is possible in many other languages
text.replace(
/CLIA\s*ID:\s*\n([\w\s]{1,30}).*/,
function(s) {return s.replace('/', ' ');}
);
Related
Regex noob here struggling with this, which I know it will be easy for some of you regex gods out there!
Given the following:
title: Some title
date: 2022-08-15
tags: <value to extract>
identifier: 1234567
---------------------------
Some text
some more text
I would like a regex to match everything except the value of tags (ie the "<value to extract>" text).
For context, this is supposed to run on emacs (in case it matters).
EDIT: Just to clarify as per #phils question, all I care about extracting the tags value. However, this is via a package setting that asks for a regex string and I don't have much control over how it gets use. It seems to expect a regex to strip what I don't need from the string rather than matching what I do want, which is slightly annoying.. Also, the since it seems to match everything with \\(.\\), I'm guessing it's using the global flag?
Please let me know if any of this isn't clear.
Emacs regular expressions can't trivially express "not foo" for arbitrary values of foo. (The likes of PCRE have non-regular extensions for zero-width negative look-ahead/behind assertions, but in Emacs that sort of functionality is generally done with the support of lisp code1.)
You can still do it purely with regexp matching, but it's simply very cumbersome. An Emacs regexp which matches any line which does not begin with tags: is:
^\(?:$\|[^t]\|t[^a]\|ta[^g]\|tag[^s]\|tags[^:]\).*
or if you need to enter it in the elisp double-quoted read syntax for strings:
"^\\(?:$\\|[^t]\\|t[^a]\\|ta[^g]\\|tag[^s]\\|tags[^:]\\).*"
1 In lisp code you would instead simply check each line to see whether it does start with tags: and, if so, skip it (which is why Emacs generally gets away without the feature you're looking for, but of course that doesn't help you here).
After playing around with it for a bit and taken inspiration from #phils' answer, I've come up with the following:
"^\\(?:\\(#\\+\\)?\\(?:filetags:\s+\\|tags:\s+\\|title:.*\\|identifier:.*\\|date:.*\\)\\|.*\\)"
I've also added an extra \\(#\\+\\)? to account for org meta keys which would usually have the format #+key: value.
This is my reg expression that find it
(<instance_material symbol="material_)([0-9]+)(part)(.*?)(")(/)(>)
I need to find a string that does not contain the word "part"
and the xml lines are
<instance_material symbol="material_677part01_h502_w5" target="#material_677part01_h502_w5"/>
<instance_material symbol="material_677" target="#material_677"/>
You can use negative lookahead
^(?!.*part).*?$
^ - 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 currently have a requirement to parse a sysprep.inf file and insert a value input by the end user.
I'm coding this utility using AutoIT and my regular expression is slightly out.
The line I need amending is as follows:
ComputerName=%DeviceName%
DeviceName is variable injected by LANDesk. If the device has previously been in the LANDesk database the name is injected into the file. If not the variable name remains. The device name must go after the =
Here is a snippet of my current code:
$FileContents = StringRegExpReplace($FileContents,'ComputerName=[a-z]','ComputerName='& $deviceNameInput)
Thanks for any guidance anyone can offer.
I'm not familiar with AutoIT or BASIC... but it looks like you need to be using something like this:
$FileContents = StringRegExpReplace($FileContents,'.*ComputerName=(\%[a-zA-Z]*\%).*', $deviceNameInput)
OR
$FileContents = StringRegExpReplace($FileContents,'ComputerName=\%[a-zA-Z]*\%', 'ComputerName='&$deviceNameInput)
this will only replace a device name that's a-z or A-Z. Not numerical or containing spaces.
Writing regular expressions can be tough because there are so many dialects of regular expressions. Assuming you are using a regex library that supports a Perl-like dialect you might want to try this for your regex:
^\s*ComputerName\s*=\s*(?:%DeviceName%|[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)
Basically this regex will match an lines either the litteral string ComputerName=%DeviceName% or ComputerName=<some actual device name that only contains the characters a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _, and ->. This regex is also a bit lenient in that it will match a line that contains whitespace at the beginning of the line as well as before and/or after the equals sign. The image below explains the components of this regex in greater detail.
p.s. that image was generated by RegexBuddy, an excellent regular expression IDE.
Autoit has a great way of dealing with ini files - IniWrite
IniWrite("SysPrep.ini", "write_section_here", "ComputerName", $deviceNameInput)
creates or updates SysPrep.ini with:
[write_section_here]
ComputerName=localhost
Is it possible to concatenate the results of Regex Pattern Matching using only Regex syntax?
The specific instance is a program is allowing regex syntax to pull info from a file, but I would like it to pull from several portions and concatenate the results.
For instance:
Input string: 1234567890
Desired result string: 2389
Regex Pattern match: (?<=1).+(?=4)%%(?<=7).+(?=0)
Where %% represents some form of concatenation syntax. Using starting and ending with syntax is important since I know the field names but not the values of the field.
Does a keyword that functions like %% exist? Is there a more clever way to do this? Must the code be changed to allow multiple regex inputs, automatically concatenating?
Again, the pieces to be concatenated may be far apart with unknown characters in between. All that is known is the information surrounding the substrings.
2011-08-08 edit: The program is written in C#, but changing the code is a major undertaking compared to finding a regex-based solution.
Without knowing exactly what you want to match and what language you're using, it's impossible to give you an exact answer. However, the usual way to approach something like this is to use grouping.
In C#:
string pattern = #"(?<=1)(.+)(?=4).+(?<=7)(.+)(?=0)";
Match m = Regex.Match(input, pattern);
string result = m.Groups[0] + m.Groups[1];
The same approach can be applied to many other languages as well.
Edit
If you are not able to change the code, then there's no way to accomplish what you want. The reason is that in C#, the regex string itself doesn't have any power over the output. To change the result, you'd have to either change the called method of the Regex class or do some additional work afterwards. As it is, the method called most likely just returns either a Match object or a list of matching objects, neither of which will do what you want, regardless of the input regex string.