Consider the regular expression \d*
If I try to match this against the string JJJ123, Vertica's regex functions say it matches against the string of width zero at the beginning.
If I try it instead in matlab, it reports a match starting at the character 1.
The Vertica docs say that its regex engine is PCRE. I can't find much on matlab's, though I found hints that it's similar to perl's.
Which of the behaviors is more standard for perl-like regex engine?
Matlab's regexp has an emptymatch option that controls whether it will allow an entire regex expression to match an empty string. It is off ("noemptymatch") by default. See help regexp.
Vertica's matching the 0-length empty string at the beginning is normal behavior for most regex dialects that I know, including anything Perl-like.
To get the same behavior as Vertica, where it can match 0-length strings, pass the 'emptymatch' option in your regexp call. Also pass 'once' to prevent it from matching the empty spaces between each and every character in your string.
[a,b,c,d] = regexp('JJJ123', '\d*', 'emptymatch', 'once')
Related
I'm trying to write a regular expression which returns a string after a particular string.
For example:
The string is
"<https://meraki/api/v1/sm/devices?fields%5B%5D=imei%2Ciccid%2ClastConnected%2CownerEmail%2C+ownerUsername%2CphoneNumber&perPage=1000&startingAfter=0>; rel=first"
result I'm expecting is -- first.
Here is the expression i'm using
(?<=rel=\s").*(?=\)
Okay so this should work:
(?<=rel[=])[^"]*
I would advise looking over the syntax of regex again, because yours was not even matching the colons correctly. Look behinds (?<=pattern) match before the pattern you want to capture. Likewise look aheads (?=pattern) match after the pattern.
You can test your regex online here (or many other sites). They will show you the matching groups and errors, but will also explain what certain parts of the pattern do.
Is it possible to negate a word in pure ERE regex (POSIX.2 Extended Regular Expressions) ?
its seems possible to negate a character or class using ^ as [^ab] which will negate either character a b but how to negate a word as ab (and not either)?
If I have a variable with the following value:
week="Monday|Tuesday|Wednesday|Thursday"
Is it possible to extract all content of week without Tuesday to get a result as:
week="Monday|Wednesday|Thursday"
Regards
You cannot negate a word with any regex engine.
It is only possible to match a continuous piece of text in one go. So, you cannot get a Monday|Wednesday|Thursday as full match after running the string through a regex.
If you want to skip a word you usually remove it from the string. Check if your environment offers a replacing feature.
Also, sometimes, it is possible to split a string with the string to skip. Check if there is split support in your environment.
I am trying to create a regex to find the following string:
AGK-XL.
Sometimes before and after this string there are other characters that are usually harmless, except if there is the following pattern before the string:
NOT-
I need to delete/ignore those cases.
This is what I have tried:
^[^N][^O][^T][^\-]AGK-XL\.(\s|\W|$)
But it only seems to match when there are exactly 4 letters in front of the string. How can I express that any other pattern besides NOT- before AGK-XL. is harmless?
Thanks for any hints.
edit: I am using regex in VBA atm.
If you cannot use fancy look-behinds, you can rely on capturing mechanism when you need to match something we do not want, and match and capture what you want. See the The Best Regex Trick Ever at rexegg.com.
However, in this case, you can match and capture NOT-AGK-XL. (so that you can restore it later with $1 backreference), and only match all other occurrences of AGK-XL. that you will remove. Use alternation operator | to match both alternatives:
(NOT-AGK-XL\.(?!\w))|AGK-XL\.(?!\w)
See demo
Note I replaced (\s|\W|$) with (?!\w) that is - IMHO - a better word boundary check.
I have a source file with literally hundreds of occurrences of strings flecha.jpg and flecha1.jpg, but I need to find occurrences of any other .jpg image (i.e. casa.jpg, moto.jpg, whatever)
I have tried using a regular expression with negative lookbehind, like this:
(?<!flecha|flecha1).jpg
but it doesn't work! Notepad++ simply says that it is an invalid regular expression.
I have tried the regex elsewhere and it works, here is an example so I guess it is a problem with NPP's handling of regexes or with the syntax of lookbehinds/lookaheads.
So how could I achieve the same regex result in NPP?
If useful, I am using Notepad++ version 6.3 Unicode
As an extra, if you are so kind, what would be the syntax to achieve the same thing but with optional numbers (in this case only '1') as a suffix of my string? (even if it doesn't work in NPP, just to know)...
I tried (?<!flecha[1]?).jpg but it doesn't work. It should work the same as the other regex, see here (RegExr)
Notepad++ seems to not have implemented variable-length look-behinds (this happens with some tools). A workaround is to use more than one fixed-length look-behind:
(?<!flecha)(?<!flecha1)\.jpg
As you can check, the matches are the same. But this works with npp.
Notice I escaped the ., since you are trying to match extensions, what you want is the literal .. The way you had, it was a wildcard - could be any character.
About the extra question, unfortunately, as we can't have variable-length look-behinds, it is not possible to have optional suffixes (numbers) without having multiple look-behinds.
Solving the problem of the variable-length-negative-lookbehind limitation in Notepad++
Given here are several strategies for working around this limitation in Notepad++ (or any regex engine with the same limitation)
Defining the problem
Notepad++ does not support the use of variable-length negative lookbehind assertions, and it would be nice to have some workarounds. Let's consider the example in the original question, but assume we want to avoid occurrences of files named flecha with any number of digits after flecha, and with any characters before flecha. In that case, a regex utilizing a variable-length negative lookbehind would look like (?<!flecha[0-9]*)\.jpg.
Strings we don't want to match in this example
flecha.jpg
flecha1.jpg
flecha00501275696.jpg
aflecha.jpg
img_flecha9.jpg
abcflecha556677.jpg
The Strategies
Inserting Temporary Markers
Begin by performing a find-and-replace on the instances that you want to avoid working with - in our case, instances of flecha[0-9]*\.jpg. Insert a special marker to form a pattern that doesn't appear anywhere else. For this example, we will insert an extra . before .jpg, assuming that ..jpg doesn't appear elsewhere. So we do:
Find: (flecha[0-9]*)(\.jpg)
Replace with: $1.$2
Now you can search your document for all the other .jpg filenames with a simple regex like \w+\.jpg or (?<!\.)\.jpg and do what you want with them. When you're done, do a final find-and-replace operation where you replace all instances of ..jpg with .jpg, to remove the temporary marker.
Using a negative lookahead assertion
A negative lookahead assertion can be used to make sure that you're not matching the undesired file names:
(?<!\S)(?!\S*flecha\d*\.jpg)\S+\.jpg
Breaking it down:
(?<!\S) ensures that your match begins at the start of a file name, and not in the middle, by asserting that your match is not preceded by a non-whitespace character.
(?!\S*flecha\d*\.jpg) ensures that whatever is matched does not contain the pattern we want to avoid
\S+\.jpg is what actually gets matched -- a string of non-whitespace characters followed by .jpg.
Using multiple fixed-length negative lookbehinds
This is a quick (but not-so-elegant) solution for situations where the pattern you don't want to match has a small number of possible lengths.
For example, if we know that flecha is only followed by up to three digits, our regex could be:
(?<!flecha)(?<!flecha[0-9])(?<!flecha[0-9][0-9])(?<!flecha[0-9][0-9][0-9])\.jpg
Are you aware that you're only matching (in the sense of consuming) the extension (.jpg)? I would think you wanted to match the whole filename, no? And that's much easier to do with a lookahead:
\b(?!flecha1?\b)\w+\.jpg
The first \b anchors the match to the beginning of the name (assuming it's really a filename we're looking at). Then (?!flecha1?\b) asserts that the name is not flecha or flecha1. Once that's done, the \w+ goes ahead and consumes the name. Then \.jpg grabs the extension to finish off the match.
How I can get part of SIP URI?
For example I have URI sip:username#sip.somedomain.com, I need get just username and I use [^sip:](.*)[$#]+ expression, but appeared result is username#. How I can exclude from matching #?
this should do the job
(?<=^sip:)(.*)(?=[$#])
Use a lookahead instead of actually matching #:
^sip:(.*?)(?=#|\$)
Either you are using a very strange regex flavor, or your starting character class is a mistake. [^sip:] matches a single character that isn't any of s,i,p or :. I am also not certain what the $ character is for, since that isn't a part of SIP syntax.
If lookaheads are not available in your regex flavour (for instance POSIX regexes lack them), you can still match parts of the string in your regex you don't eventually want to return, if you use capture groups and only grab the contents of some of them.
For example
^sip:(.*?)[$#]+ Then only return the contents of the first capture group