I have a string which can contain any number of the delimiter §\n. I would like to remove all delimiters from a string, except the last occurrence which should be left as-is. The last delimiter can be in three states: \n, §\n or §§\n. There will never be any characters after the last variable delimiter.
Here are 3 examples with the different state delimiters:
abc§\ndef§\nghi\n
abc§\ndef§\nghi§\n
abc§\ndef§\nghi§§\n
I would like to remove all delimiters except the last occurrence.
So the result of gsub for the three examples above should be:
abcdefghi\n
abcdefghi§\n
abcdefghi§§\n
Using regular expressions, one could use §\\n(?=.), which matches properly for all three cases using positive lookahead, as there will never be any characters after the last variable delimiter.
I know I could check if the string has the delimiter at the end, and then after a substitution using the Lua pattern §\n I could add the delimiter back onto the string. That is however a very inelegant solution to a problem which should be possible to solve using a Lua pattern alone.
So how could this be done using a Lua pattern?
str:gsub( '§\\n(.)', '%1' ) should do what you want. This deletes the delimiter given that it is followed by another character, putting this character back into to string.
Test code
local str = {
'abc§\\ndef§\\nghi\\n',
'abc§\\ndef§\\nghi§\\n',
'abc§\\ndef§\\nghi§§\\n',
}
for i = 1, #str do
print( ( str[ i ]:gsub( '§\\n(.)', '%1' ) ) )
end
yields
abcdefghi\n
abcdefghi§\n
abcdefghi§§\n
EDIT: This answer doesn't work specifically for lua, but if you have a similar problem and are not constrained to lua you might be able to use it.
So if I understand correctly, you want a regex replace to make the first example look like the second. This:
/(.*?)§\\n(?=.*\\n)/g
will eliminate the non-last delimiters when replaced with
$1
in PCRE, at least. I'm not sure what flavor Lua follows, but you can see the example in action here.
REGEX:
/(.*?)§\\n(?=.*\\n)/g
TEST STRING:
abc§\ndef§\nghi\n
abc§\ndef§\nghi§\n
abc§\ndef§\nghi§§\n
SUBSTITUTION:
$1
RESULT:
abcdefghi\n
abcdefghi§\n
abcdefghi§§\n
Related
I want to select some string combination (with dots(.)) from a very long string (sql). The full string could be a single line or multiple line with new line separator, and this combination could be in start (at first line) or a next line (new line) or at both place.
I need help in writing a regex for it.
Examples:
String s = I am testing something like test.test.test in sentence.
Expected output: test.test.test
Example2 (real usecase):
UPDATE test.table
SET access = 01
WHERE access IN (
SELECT name FROM project.dataset.tablename WHERE name = 'test' GROUP BY 1 )
Expected output: test.table and project.dataset.tablename
, can I also add some prefix or suffix words or space which should be present where ever this logic gets checked. In above case if its update regex should pick test.table, but if the statement is like select test.table regex should not pick it up this combinations and same applies for suffix.
Example3: This is to illustrate the above theory.
INS INTO test.table
SEL 'abcscsc', wu_id.Item_Nbr ,1
FROM test.table as_t
WHERE as_t.old <> 0 AND as_t.date = 11
AND (as_t.numb IN ('11') )
Expected Output: test.table, test.table (Key words are INTO and FROM)
Things Not Needed in selection:as_t.numb, as_t.old, as_t.date
If I get the regex I can use in program to extract this word.
Note: Before and after string words to the combination could be anything like update, select { or(, so we have to find the occurrence of words which are joined together with .(dot) and all the number of such occurrence.
I tried something like this:
(?<=.)(.?)(?=.)(.?) -: This only selected the word between two .dot and not all.
.(?<=.)(.?)(?=.)(.?). - This everything before and after.
To solve your initial problem, we can just use some negation. Here's the pattern I came up with:
[^\s]+\.[^\s]+
[^ ... ] Means to make a character class including everything except for what's between the brackets. In this case, I put \s in there, which matches any whitespace. So [^\s] matches anything that isn't whitespace.
+ Is a quantifier. It means to find as many of the preceding construct as you can without breaking the match. This would happily match everything that's not whitespace, but I follow it with a \., which matches a literal .. The \ is necessary because . means to match any character in regex, so we need to escape it so it only has its literal meaning. This means there has to be a . in this group of non-whitespace characters.
I end the pattern with another [^\s]+, which matches everything after the . until the next whitespace.
Now, to solve your secondary problem, you want to make this match only work if it is preceded by a given keyword. Luckily, regex has a construct almost specifically for this case. It's called a lookbehind. The syntax is (?<= ... ) where the ... is the pattern you want to look for. Using your example, this will only match after the keywords INTO and FROM:
(?<=(?:INTO|FROM)\s)[^\s]+\.[^\s]+
Here (?:INTO|FROM) means to match either the text INTO or the text FROM. I then specify that it should be followed by a whitespace character with \s. One possible problem here is that it will only match if the keywords are written in all upper case. You can change this behavior by specifying the case insensitive flag i to your regex parser. If your regex parser doesn't have a way to specify flags, you can usually still specify it inline by putting (?i) in front of the pattern, like so:
(?i)(?<=(?:INTO|FROM)\s)[^\s]+\.[^\s]+
If you are new to regex, I highly recommend using the www.regex101.com website to generate regex and learn how it works. Don't forget to check out the code generator part for getting the regex code based on the programming language you are using, that's a cool feature.
For your question, you need a regex that understands any word character \w that matches between 0 and unlimited times, followed by a dot, followed by another series of word character that repeats between 0 and unlimited times.
So here is my solution to your question:
Your regex in JavaScript:
const regex = /([\w][.][\w])+/gm;
in Java:
final String regex = "([\w][.][\w])+";
in Python:
regex = r"([\w][.][\w])+"
in PHP:
$re = '/([\w][.][\w])+/m';
Note that: this solution is written for your use case (to be used for SQL strings), because now if you have something like '.word' or 'word..word', it will still catch it which I assume you don't have a string like that.
See this screenshot for more details
I am processing a CSV file and want to search and replace strings as long as it is an exact match in the column. For example:
xxx,Apple,Green Apple,xxx,xxx
Apple,xxx,xxx,Apple,xxx
xxx,xxx,Fruit/Apple,xxx,Apple
I want to replace 'Apple' if it is the EXACT value in the column (if it is contained in text within another column, I do not want to replace). I cannot see how to do this with a single expression (maybe not possible?).
The desired output is:
xxx,GRAPE,Green Apple,xxx,xxx
GRAPE,xxx,xxx,GRAPE,xxx
xxx,xxx,Fruit/Apple,xxx,GRAPE
So the expression I want is: match the beginning of input OR a comma, followed by desired string, followed by a comma OR the end of input.
You cannot put ^ or $ in character classes, so I tried \A and \Z but that didn't work.
([\A,])Apple([\Z,])
This didn't work, sadly. Can I do this with one regular expression? Seems like this would be a common enough problem.
It will depend on your language, but if the one you use supports lookarounds, then you would use something like this:
(?<=,|^)Apple(?=,|$)
Replace with GRAPE.
Otherwise, you will have to put back the commas:
(^|,)Apple(,|$)
Or
(\A|,)Apple(,|\Z)
And replace with:
\1GRAPE\2
Or
$1GRAPE$2
Depending on what's supported.
The above are raw regex (and replacement) strings. Escape as necessary.
Note: The disadvatage with the latter solution is that it will not work on strings like:
xxx,Apple,Apple,xxx,xxx
Since the comma after the first Apple got consumed. You'd have to call the regex replacement at most twice if you have such cases.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, you can have some 'hybrids' since some language have different levels of support for lookbehinds (in all the below ^ and \A, $ and \Z, \1 and $1 are interchangeable, just so I don't make it longer than it already is):
(?:(?<=,)|(?<=^))Apple(?=,|$)
For those where lookbehinds cannot be of variable width, replace with GRAPE.
(^|,)Apple(?=,|$)
And the above one for where lookaheads are supported but not lookbehinds. Replace with \1Apple.
This does as you wish:
Find what: (^|,)(?:Apple)(,|$)
Replace with: $1GRAPE$2
This works on regex101, in all flavors.
http://regex101.com/r/iP6dZ8
I wanted to share my original work-around (before the other answers), though it feels like more of a hack.
I simply prepend and append a comma on the string before doing the simpler:
/,Apple,/,GRAPE,/g
then cut off the first and last character.
PHP looks like:
$line = substr(preg_replace($search, $replace, ','.$line.','), 1, -1);
This still suffers from the problem of consecutive columns (e.g. ",Apple,Apple,").
I'm trying to replace slashes in a string, but not all of them - only the ones before first comma. To do that, I probably have to find a way to match only slashes being followed by string containing a comma.
Is it possible to do this using one regexp, i.e. without first splitting the string by commas?
Example input string:
Abc1/Def2/Ghi3,/Dore1/Mifa2/Solla3,Sido4
What I want to get:
Abc1.Def2.Ghi3,/Dore1/Mifa2/Solla3,Sido4
I've tried some lookahead and lookbehind techniques with no effect, so currently to do this in e.g. Python I first split the data:
test = 'Abc1/Def2/Ghi3,/Dore1/Mifa2/Solla3,Sido4'
strlist = re.split(r',', test)
result = ','.join([re.sub(r'\/', r'.', strlist[0])] + strlist[1:])
What I would prefer is to use a specific regexp pattern instead of Python-oriented solution though, so essentially I could have a pattern and replacement such that the following code would give me the same result:
result = re.sub(pattern, replacement, test)
Thanks for all regex-avoiding answers - I was wondering if I could do this using only regex (so e.g. I could use sed instead of Python).
item = 'Abc1/Def2/Ghi3,/Dore1/Mifa2/Solla3,Sido4'
print item.replace("/", ".", item.count("/", 0, item.index(",")))
This will print what you need. Try to avoid regex wherever you can because they are slow.
You could do this with lookbehind expressions that look for both the beginning of the string and no comma. Or don't use re entirely.
s = 'Abc1/Def2/Ghi3,/Dore1/Mifa2/Solla3,Sido4'
left,sep,right = s.partition(',')
sep.join((left.replace('/','.'),right))
Out[24]: 'Abc1.Def2.Ghi3,/Dore1/Mifa2/Solla3,Sido4'
Is there a simple way to ignore the white space in a target string when searching for matches using a regular expression pattern? For example, if my search is for "cats", I would want "c ats" or "ca ts" to match. I can't strip out the whitespace beforehand because I need to find the begin and end index of the match (including any whitespace) in order to highlight that match and any whitespace needs to be there for formatting purposes.
You can stick optional whitespace characters \s* in between every other character in your regex. Although granted, it will get a bit lengthy.
/cats/ -> /c\s*a\s*t\s*s/
While the accepted answer is technically correct, a more practical approach, if possible, is to just strip whitespace out of both the regular expression and the search string.
If you want to search for "my cats", instead of:
myString.match(/m\s*y\s*c\s*a\*st\s*s\s*/g)
Just do:
myString.replace(/\s*/g,"").match(/mycats/g)
Warning: You can't automate this on the regular expression by just replacing all spaces with empty strings because they may occur in a negation or otherwise make your regular expression invalid.
Addressing Steven's comment to Sam Dufel's answer
Thanks, sounds like that's the way to go. But I just realized that I only want the optional whitespace characters if they follow a newline. So for example, "c\n ats" or "ca\n ts" should match. But wouldn't want "c ats" to match if there is no newline. Any ideas on how that might be done?
This should do the trick:
/c(?:\n\s*)?a(?:\n\s*)?t(?:\n\s*)?s/
See this page for all the different variations of 'cats' that this matches.
You can also solve this using conditionals, but they are not supported in the javascript flavor of regex.
You could put \s* inbetween every character in your search string so if you were looking for cat you would use c\s*a\s*t\s*s\s*s
It's long but you could build the string dynamically of course.
You can see it working here: http://www.rubular.com/r/zzWwvppSpE
If you only want to allow spaces, then
\bc *a *t *s\b
should do it. To also allow tabs, use
\bc[ \t]*a[ \t]*t[ \t]*s\b
Remove the \b anchors if you also want to find cats within words like bobcats or catsup.
This approach can be used to automate this
(the following exemplary solution is in python, although obviously it can be ported to any language):
you can strip the whitespace beforehand AND save the positions of non-whitespace characters so you can use them later to find out the matched string boundary positions in the original string like the following:
def regex_search_ignore_space(regex, string):
no_spaces = ''
char_positions = []
for pos, char in enumerate(string):
if re.match(r'\S', char): # upper \S matches non-whitespace chars
no_spaces += char
char_positions.append(pos)
match = re.search(regex, no_spaces)
if not match:
return match
# match.start() and match.end() are indices of start and end
# of the found string in the spaceless string
# (as we have searched in it).
start = char_positions[match.start()] # in the original string
end = char_positions[match.end()] # in the original string
matched_string = string[start:end] # see
# the match WITH spaces is returned.
return matched_string
with_spaces = 'a li on and a cat'
print(regex_search_ignore_space('lion', with_spaces))
# prints 'li on'
If you want to go further you can construct the match object and return it instead, so the use of this helper will be more handy.
And the performance of this function can of course also be optimized, this example is just to show the path to a solution.
The accepted answer will not work if and when you are passing a dynamic value (such as "current value" in an array loop) as the regex test value. You would not be able to input the optional white spaces without getting some really ugly regex.
Konrad Hoffner's solution is therefore better in such cases as it will strip both the regest and test string of whitespace. The test will be conducted as though both have no whitespace.
I suspect this has already been answered somewhere, but I can't find it, so...
I need to extract a string from between two tokens in a larger string, in which the second token will probably appear again meaning... (pseudo code...)
myString = "A=abc;B=def_3%^123+-;C=123;" ;
myB = getInnerString(myString, "B=", ";" ) ;
method getInnerString(inStr, startToken, endToken){
return inStr.replace( EXPRESSION, "$1");
}
so, when I run this using expression ".+B=(.+);.+"
I get "def_3%^123+-;C=123;" presumably because it just looks for the LAST instance of ';' in the string, rather than stopping at the first one it comes to.
I've tried using (?=) in search of that first ';' but it gives me the same result.
I can't seem to find a regExp reference that explains how one can specify the "NEXT" token rather than the one at the end.
any and all help greatly appreciated.
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You're using a greedy pattern by not specifying the ? in it. Try this:
".+B=(.+?);.+"
Try this:
B=([^;]+);
This matches everything between B= and ; unless it is a ;. So it matches everything between B= and the first ; thereafter.
(This is a continuation of the conversation from the comments to Evan's answer.)
Here's what happens when your (corrected) regex is applied: First, the .+ matches the whole string. Then it backtracks, giving up most of the characters it just matched until it gets to the point where the B= can match. Then the (.+?) matches (and captures) everything it sees until the next part, the semicolon, can match. Then the final .+ gobbles up the remaining characters.
All you're really interested in is the "B=" and the ";" and whatever's between them, so why match the rest of the string? The only reason you have to do that is so you can replace the whole string with the contents of the capturing group. But why bother doing that if you can access contents of the group directly? Here's a demonstration (in Java, because I can't tell what language you're using):
String s = "A=abc;B=def_3%^123+-;C=123;";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("B=(.*?);");
Matcher m = p.matcher(s);
if (m.find())
{
System.out.println(m.group(1));
}
Why do a 'replace' when a 'find' is so much more straightforward? Probably because your API makes it easier; that's why we do it in Java. Java has several regex-oriented convenience methods in its String class: replaceAll(), replaceFirst(), split(), and matches() (which returns true iff the regex matches the whole string), but not find(). And there's no convenience method for accessing capturing groups, either. We can't match the elegance of Perl one-liners like this:
print $1 if 'A=abc;B=def_3%^123+-;C=123;' =~ /B=(.*?);/;
...so we content ourselves with hacks like this:
System.out.println("A=abc;B=def_3%^123+-;C=123;"
.replaceFirst(".+B=(.*?);.+", "$1"));
Just to be clear, I'm not saying not to use these hacks, or that there's anything wrong with Evan's answer--there isn't. I just think we should understand why we use them, and what trade-offs we're making when we do.