I'm converting a text file to a Tab-Delimited text file, and ran into a bit of a snag. I can get everything I need to work the way I want except for one small part.
One field I'm working with has the home addresses of the subjects as a single entry ("1234 Happy Lane Somewhere, St 12345") and I need each broken down by Street(Tab)City(Tab)State(Tab)Zip. The one part I'm hung up on is the Tab between the State and the Zip.
I've been using input=input.Replace throughout, and it's worked well so far, but I can't think of how to untangle this one. The wildcards I'm used to don't seem to be working, I can't replace ("?? #####") with ("??" + ControlChars.Tab + "#####")...which I honestly didn't expect to work, but it's the only idea on the matter I had.
I've read a bit about using Regex, but have no experience with it, and it seems a bit...overwhelming.
Is Regex my best option for this? If not, are there any other suggestions on solutions I may have missed?
Thanks for your time. :)
EDIT: Here's what I'm using so far. It makes some edits to the line in question, taking care of spaces, commas, and other text I don't need, but I've got nothing for the State/Zip situation; I've a bad habit of wiping something if it doesn't work, but I'll append the last thing I used to the very end, if that'll help.
If input Like "Guar*###/###-####" Then
input = input.Replace("Guar:", "")
input = input.Replace(" ", ControlChars.Tab)
input = input.Replace(",", ControlChars.Tab)
input = "C" + ControlChars.Tab + strAccount + ControlChars.Tab + input
End If
input = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(" #####", ControlChars.Tab + "#####") <-- Just one example of something that doesn't work.
This is what's written to input in this example
" Guar: LASTNAME,FIRSTNAME 999 E 99TH ST CITY,ST 99999 Tel: 999/999-9999"
And this is what I can get as a result so far
C 99999/9 LASTNAME FIRSTNAME 999 E 99TH ST CITY ST 99999 999/999-9999
With everything being exactly what I need besides the "ST 99999" bit (with actual data obviously omitted for privacy and professional whatnots).
UPDATE: Just when I thought it was all squared away, I've got another snag. The raw data gives me this.
# TERMINOLOGY ######### ##/##/#### # ###.##
And the end result is giving me this, because this is a chunk of data that was just fine as-is...before I removed the Tabs. Now I need a way to replace them after they've been removed, or to omit this small group of code from a document-wide Tab genocide I initiate the code with.
#TERMINOLOGY###########/##/########.##
Would a variant on rgx.Replace work best here? Or can I copy the code to a variable, remove Tabs from the document, then insert the variable without losing the tabs?
I think what you're looking for is
Dim r As New System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex(" (\d{5})(?!\d)")
Dim input As String = rgx.Replace(input, ControlChars.Tab + "$1")
The first line compiles the regular expression. The \d matches a digit, and the {5}, as you can guess, matches 5 repetitions of the previous atom. The parentheses surrounding the \d{5} is known as a capture group, and is responsible for putting what's captured in a pseudovariable named $1. The (?!\d) is a more advanced concept known as a negative lookahead assertion, and it basically peeks at the next character to check that it's not a digit (because then it could be a 6-or-more digit number, where the first 5 happened to get matched). Another version is
" (\d{5})\b"
where the \b is a word boundary, disallowing alphanumeric characters following the digits.
Related
So I had this code working for a few months already, lets say I have a table called Categories, which has a string column called name, so I receive a string and I want to know if any category was mentioned (a mention occur when the string contains the substring: #name_of_a_category), the approach I follow for this was something like below:
categories.select { |category_i| content_received.downcase.match(/##{category_i.downcase}/)}
That worked pretty well until today suddenly started to receive an exception unmatched close parenthesis, I realized that the categories names can contain special chars so I decided to not consider special chars or spaces anymore (don't want to add restrictions to the user and at the same time don't want to deal with those cases so the policy is just to ignore it).
So the question is there a clean way of removing these special chars (maintaining the #) and matching the string (don't want to modify the data just ignore it while looking for mentions)?
You can also use
prep_content_received = content_received.gsub(/[^\w\s]|_/,'')
p categories.select { |c|
prep_content_received.match?(/\b#{c.gsub(/[^\w\s]|_/, '').strip()}\b/i)
}
See the Ruby demo
Details:
The prep_content_received = content_received.gsub(/[^\w\s]|_/,'') creates a copy of content_received with no special chars and _. Using it once reduced overhead if there are a lot of categories
Then, you iterate over the categories list, and each time check if the prep_content_received matches \b (word boundary) + category with all special chars, _ and leading/trailing whitespace stripped from it + \b in a case insensitive way (see the /i flag, no need to .downcase).
So after looking around I found some answers on the platform but nothing with my specific requirements (maybe I missed something, if so please let me know), and this is how I fix it for my case:
content_received = 'pepe is watching a #comedy :)'
categories = ['comedy :)', 'terror']
temp_content = content_received.downcase
categories.select { |category_i| temp_content.gsub(/[^\sa-zA-Z0-9]/, '#' => '#').match?(/##{category_i.downcase.
gsub(/[^\sa-zA-Z0-9]/, '')}/) }
For the sake of the example, I reduced the categories to a simple array of strings, basically the first gsub, remove any character that is not a letter or a number (any special character) and replace each # with an #, the second gsub is a simpler version of the first one.
You can test the snippet above here
The data I want to parse has columns with the following format:
Character Big Medium Meaning ImageCode Small Constitutens Lesson Frame Strokes JH JTPL Heisig Story koohiiStory1 koohiiStory2 On-Reading Kun-Reading Examples:
All of those are separated by tabs \t (even though it may not look like it on the browser). Also notice at the end of each line there is a colon :. The problem is that the columns koohiiStory2 and examples may or may not exist and there may also be cases in which the data is corrupt and there is a tab inside Heisig Story but those are the minority.
What I'm trying to match is the values for On-Reading, Kun-Reading and Examples. All of these are distinct from the rest because they don't use standard english characters (romaji) but they use japanese characters instead with the exception of perhaps a few commas or dots. It is also guaranteed that either Kun-Reading or Examples will end with a colon : and that On-Reading and Kun-Reading will exist and that all three of the columns will be consecutive.
Here is some sample data.
How can I parse that to return this?
Alright, I'll give it a shot.
Since the content you expect is mostly non-ascii characters within a dot + space or tab* and :
(?<=\.(\s|\t)) // Positive lookbehind for a 'dot' + 'space or tab'
[^\w]+ // Any non words
(?=\:) // Positive lookahead for a ':'
Working sample on regex101
I'm wanting to write a regular expression for matching strings that are wrapped in * characters, much like markdown which uses them to **make things bold**.
But I'm wanting to also wanting the number of *'s at the start and end to be a variable amount. The amount of stars will amount to how important that string is.
At the moment I'm using this;
/(\*\*\*|\*\*|\*)(.*?)\1/
Which works for upto ***three*** either side. This returns both the string between the *'s and the string containing the ***. I then count the length of that string to get the number of *'s.
In ruby, this looks like;
"*this is important*, but this is ***very important***.scan(/(\*\*\*|\*\*|\*)(.*?)\1/).each do |match|
points << { :str => match[1], :importance => match[0].length }
end
The regex is working fine in most parts, but if I wanted to get ********something really important********; the expression would get a bit out of hand - doing it the way I have so far.
I understand my current pattern is searching for an amount of *'s and finding the text between that and another occurrence of the same string. But it would also be nice to account for human error, such as a string like;
**This is quite important*, but ***this is really important****.
Thanks all!
What about simply the below?
/(\*+)(.*?)\1/
\*+ is one or more *'s.
Or, if you want to limit it to a specific amount:
/(\*{1,5})(.*?)\1/
\*{1,5} means anywhere between 1 and 5 *'s. You're obviously free to change 1 and 5 as you see fit.
Different lengths on either side:
The above will work for the same amount of *'s on both sides (because of the back-reference \1).
If you want to allow for different amounts on either side, you can use \*+ instead of \1, so:
/(\*+)(.*?)\*+/
I had this question a couple of times before, and I still couldn't find a good answer..
In my current problem, I have a console program output (string) that looks like this:
Number of assemblies processed = 1200
Number of assemblies uninstalled = 1197
Number of failures = 3
Now I want to extract those numbers and to check if there were failures. (That's a gacutil.exe output, btw.) In other words, I want to match any number [0-9]+ in the string that is preceded by 'failures = '.
How would I do that? I want to get the number only. Of course I can match the whole thing like /failures = [0-9]+/ .. and then trim the first characters with length("failures = ") or something like that. The point is, I don't want to do that, it's a lame workaround.
Because it's odd; if my pattern-to-match-but-not-into-output ("failures = ") comes after the thing i want to extract ([0-9]+), there is a way to do it:
pattern(?=expression)
To show the absurdity of this, if the whole file was processed backwards, I could use:
[0-9]+(?= = seruliaf)
... so, is there no forward-way? :T
pattern(?=expression) is a regex positive lookahead and what you are looking for is a regex positive lookbehind that goes like this (?<=expression)pattern but this feature is not supported by all flavors of regex. It depends which language you are using.
more infos at regular-expressions.info for comparison of Lookaround feature scroll down 2/3 on this page.
If your console output does actually look like that throughout, try splitting the string on "=" when the word "failure" is found, then get the last element (or the 2nd element). You did not say what your language is, but any decent language with string splitting capability would do the job. For example
gacutil.exe.... | ruby -F"=" -ane "print $F[-1] if /failure/"
Is it possible to write a regular expression that matches all strings that does not only contain numbers? If we have these strings:
abc
a4c
4bc
ab4
123
It should match the four first, but not the last one. I have tried fiddling around in RegexBuddy with lookaheads and stuff, but I can't seem to figure it out.
(?!^\d+$)^.+$
This says lookahead for lines that do not contain all digits and match the entire line.
Unless I am missing something, I think the most concise regex is...
/\D/
...or in other words, is there a not-digit in the string?
jjnguy had it correct (if slightly redundant) in an earlier revision.
.*?[^0-9].*
#Chad, your regex,
\b.*[a-zA-Z]+.*\b
should probably allow for non letters (eg, punctuation) even though Svish's examples didn't include one. Svish's primary requirement was: not all be digits.
\b.*[^0-9]+.*\b
Then, you don't need the + in there since all you need is to guarantee 1 non-digit is in there (more might be in there as covered by the .* on the ends).
\b.*[^0-9].*\b
Next, you can do away with the \b on either end since these are unnecessary constraints (invoking reference to alphanum and _).
.*[^0-9].*
Finally, note that this last regex shows that the problem can be solved with just the basics, those basics which have existed for decades (eg, no need for the look-ahead feature). In English, the question was logically equivalent to simply asking that 1 counter-example character be found within a string.
We can test this regex in a browser by copying the following into the location bar, replacing the string "6576576i7567" with whatever you want to test.
javascript:alert(new String("6576576i7567").match(".*[^0-9].*"));
/^\d*[a-z][a-z\d]*$/
Or, case insensitive version:
/^\d*[a-z][a-z\d]*$/i
May be a digit at the beginning, then at least one letter, then letters or digits
Try this:
/^.*\D+.*$/
It returns true if there is any simbol, that is not a number. Works fine with all languages.
Since you said "match", not just validate, the following regex will match correctly
\b.*[a-zA-Z]+.*\b
Passing Tests:
abc
a4c
4bc
ab4
1b1
11b
b11
Failing Tests:
123
if you are trying to match worlds that have at least one letter but they are formed by numbers and letters (or just letters), this is what I have used:
(\d*[a-zA-Z]+\d*)+
If we want to restrict valid characters so that string can be made from a limited set of characters, try this:
(?!^\d+$)^[a-zA-Z0-9_-]{3,}$
or
(?!^\d+$)^[\w-]{3,}$
/\w+/:
Matches any letter, number or underscore. any word character
.*[^0-9]{1,}.*
Works fine for us.
We want to use the used answer, but it's not working within YANG model.
And the one I provided here is easy to understand and it's clear:
start and end could be any chars, but, but there must be at least one NON NUMERICAL characters, which is greatest.
I am using /^[0-9]*$/gm in my JavaScript code to see if string is only numbers. If yes then it should fail otherwise it will return the string.
Below is working code snippet with test cases:
function isValidURL(string) {
var res = string.match(/^[0-9]*$/gm);
if (res == null)
return string;
else
return "fail";
};
var testCase1 = "abc";
console.log(isValidURL(testCase1)); // abc
var testCase2 = "a4c";
console.log(isValidURL(testCase2)); // a4c
var testCase3 = "4bc";
console.log(isValidURL(testCase3)); // 4bc
var testCase4 = "ab4";
console.log(isValidURL(testCase4)); // ab4
var testCase5 = "123"; // fail here
console.log(isValidURL(testCase5));
I had to do something similar in MySQL and the following whilst over simplified seems to have worked for me:
where fieldname regexp ^[a-zA-Z0-9]+$
and fieldname NOT REGEXP ^[0-9]+$
This shows all fields that are alphabetical and alphanumeric but any fields that are just numeric are hidden. This seems to work.
example:
name1 - Displayed
name - Displayed
name2 - Displayed
name3 - Displayed
name4 - Displayed
n4ame - Displayed
324234234 - Not Displayed