I'm terible with regex and I can't seem to wrap my head around this simple task.
I need to parse out the two dates in a string which always has one of two formats:
"Inquiry at your property for December 29, 2013 - January 03, 2014"
OR
"Inquiry at your property for 29 December , 2013 - 03 January, 2014"
the 2 different date formats are throwing me off. Any insights would be appreciated!
/(\d+ \w+, \d+|\w+ \d+, \d+)/ for example. Try it out on Rubular.
For sure, it would pickup more stuff, like 2013 NotReallyAMonth, 12345. But if you don't have things in the input that look like a date, but not actually a date this might work.
You could make the regexp stronger, but applying more restrictions on what is matched:
/(\d{2} (?:January|December), \d{4}|(?:January|December) \d{2}, \d{4})/
In this case the day is always two digits, the year is 4. Months are listed explicitly (you would have to list all of them).
Update: For ranges it would be a different regexp:
/((?:Jan|Dec) \d+ - \d+, \d{4})/
Obviously they can all be combined together:
/(\d{2} (?:January|December), \d{4}|(?:January|December) \d{2}, \d{4}|(?:Jan|Dec) \d+ - \d+, \d{4})/
Related
How do I capture the days of months as numbers, excluding any suffixes. For instance - January 11th would be 11, and March 25th would be 25.
You could use the regex string and then only use the 3rd capturing group.
We accept 3 letter months Jan 1st and full name January 1st and accept space, hyphen,comma or slash as in Jan 01 Jan-01 Jan,1st Jan/31
(Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Jun|Jul|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec)(uary|ruary|ch|il|e|y|ust|tember|ember)?[ \/,-]{0,2}([0-3]?[0-9])
You would do better to look for native time manipulation if possible.
Is there someone to help me with the following:
I'm trying to find specific date and time strings in a text (to be used within VBA Word).
Currently working with the following RegEx string:
(?:([0-9]{1,2})[ |-])?(?:(jan(?:uari)?|feb(?:ruari)?|m(?:aa)?rt|apr(?:il)?|mei|jun(?:i)?|jul(?:i)?|aug(?:ustus)?|sep(?:tember|t)?|okt(?:ober)?|nov(?:ember)?|dec(?:ember)?))?(?: |-)?(?(3)(?: around | at | ))?(?:([0-9]{1,2}:[0-9]{1,2})?(?: uur| u|u)?)?
Tested output on following text:
date with around time: 26 sep 2016 around 09:00u
date with at time: 1 sep 2016 at 09:00 uur
date and time u: 1 sep 2018 09:00 u
time without date: 08:30 uur
date with time u: 1 sep 2016 at 09:00u
only time: 09:00
only month: jan
month and year: feb 2019
only day: 02
only day with '-': 2-
day and month: 2 jan
month year: jan 2018
date with '-': 2-feb-2018 09:00
other month: 01 sept 2016
full month: 1 september 2018
shortened year: jul '18
Rules:
a date followed by time is valid
a date followed by text 'around' or 'at', followed by time is valid
a date without day number is valid
a date without year is valid
a date, month only is not valid
a day, without month or year not valid
a date may contain dashes '-'
a year may be shortenend with ', like jun '18
month name can be short or long
full match includes ' uur' or 'u' (to highlight the text in ms-Word)
submatches text from capture are without prepending or trailing spaces
example at: [https://regex101.com/r/6CFgBP/1/]
Expected output (when using in VBA Word):
An regex Matches collection object in which each Match.SubMatches contains the individual items d, m, y, hh:mm from the capture groups in the regex search string.
So for example 1: the Submatches (or capture groups) contains values: '26' ','sep','2016','09:00'
The RegEx works fine, but some false-positives need to be excluded:
In case there is a day without month/year, should be excluded from Regex (example 9 and 10)
In case there is a month without day, should be excluded (example 7)
(I was trying with som lookahead and reference \1 and ?(1), but was not able to get it running properly...)
Any advice highly appreciated!
As I understood, you require that each date/time part (day, month, year, hour
and minute) must be present.
So you should remove ? after relevant groups (they are not optional).
It is also a good practice to have each group captured as a relevant capturing group.
There is no need to write something like jun(?:i)?. It is enough
(and easier to read) when you write just juni? (the ? refers just
to preceding i).
Another hint: As the regex language contains \d char class, use just
it instead of [0-9] (the regex is shorter and easier to read.
Optional parts (at / around) should be an optional and non-capturing group.
Anything after the minute part is not needed in the regex.
So I propose a regex like below (for readability, I divided it into rows):
(\d{1,2})[ -](jan(?:uari)?|feb(?:ruari)?|m(?:aa)?rt|apr(?:il)?|mei|juni?
|juli?|aug(?:ustus)?|sep(?:tember|t)?|okt(?:ober)?|nov(?:ember)?|dec(?:ember)?)
[ -](\d{4}) (?:around |at )?(\d{1,2}:\d{1,2})
Details:
(\d{1,2}) - Day.
[ -] - A separator after the day (either a space or a minus).
(jan(?:uari)?|...dec(?:ember)?) - Month.
[ -] - A separator after the month.
(\d{4}) - year.
(?:around |at )? - Actually, 3 variants of a separator between year
and hour (space / around / at), note the space before (...)?.
(\d{1,2}:\d{1,2}) - Hour and minute.
It matches variants 1, 2, 3, 5 and 13.
All remaining fail to contain each required part, so they are not matched.
If you allow e.g. that the hour/minute part is optional, change the respective fragment
into:
( (?:around |at )?(\d{1,2}:\d{1,2}))?
i.e. surround the space/around/at / hour / minute part with ( and )?,
making this part an optional group. Then, variants 14 and 15 will also
be matched.
One more extension: If you also allow the hour/minute part alone,
add |(\d{1,2}:\d{1,2}) to the regex (all before is the first variant and
the added part is the second variant for just hour/minute.
Then, your variants No 4 and 6 will also be matched.
For a working example see https://regex101.com/r/33t1ps/1
Edit
Following your list of rules, I propose the following regex:
(\d{1,2}[ -])? - Day + separator, optional.
(jan(?:uari)?|...|dec(?:ember)?) - Month.
(?:[ -](\d{4}|'\d{2}))? - Separator + year (either 4 or 2 digits with "'").
( (?:around |at )?(\d{1,2}:\d{1,2}))? - Separator + hour/minute -
optional end of variant 1.
|(\d{1,2}:\d{1,2}) - Variant 2 - only hour and minute.
It does not match only your variants No 9 and 10.
For full regex, including also "uur" see https://regex101.com/r/33t1ps/3
Finally I found something that helps me using the month properly :-)
\b(?:([1-3]|[0-3]\d)[ |-](?'month'(?:[1-9]|\d[12])|(?:jan(?:uari)?|feb(?:ruari)?|m(?:aa)?rt|apr(?:il)?|mei|jun(?:i)?|jul(?:i)?|aug(?:ustus)?|sep(?:tember|t)?|okt(?:ober)?|nov(?:ember)?|dec(?:ember)?))?)?(?:(\g'month')[ |-]((?:19|20|\')(?:\d{2})))?\b(?: omstreeks | om | )?(?:(\d{1,2}[:]\d{2}(?: uur|u)?|[0-2]\d{3}(?: uur|u)))?\b
It uses a named constructor/subroutine. Found here:
https://www.regular-expressions.info/subroutine.html
I am trying to use Regex to parse a series of strings to extract one or more text dates that may be in multiple formats. The strings will look something like the following:
24 Aug 2016: nno-emvirt010a/b; 16 Aug 2016 nnt-emvirt010a/b nnd-emvirt010a/b COSI-1.6.5
24.16 nno-emvirt010a/b nnt-emvirt010a/b nnd-emvirt010a/b EI.01.02.03\
9/23/16: COSI-1.6.5 Logs updated at /vobs/COTS/1.6.5/files/Status_2016-07-27.log, Status_2016-07-28.log, Status_2016-08-05.log, Status_2016-08-08.log
I am not concerned about validating the individual date fields; just extracting the date string. The part I am unable to figure out is how to not match on number sequences that match the pattern but aren’t dates (‘1.6.5’ in ex. (1) and 01.02.03 in ex. (2)) and dates that are part of a file name (2016-07-27 in ex. (3)). In each of these exception cases in my input data, the initial numbers are preceded by either a period(.), underscore (_) or dash (-), but I cannot determine how to use this to edit the pattern syntax to not match these strings.
The pattern I have that partially works is below. It will only ignore the non date matches if it starts with 1 digit as in example 1.
/[^_\.\(\/]\d{1,4}[/\-\.\s*]([1-9]|0[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01]|[a-z]{3})[/\-\.\s*]\d{1,4}/ig`
I am not sure about vba check if this works . seems they have given so much options : https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/regular-expressions-cookbook/9781449327453/ch04s04.html
^(?:(1[0-2]|0?[1-9])/(3[01]|[12][0-9]|0?[1-9])|↵
(3[01]|[12][0-9]|0?[1-9])/(1[0-2]|0?[1-9]))/(?:[0-9]{2})?[0-9]{2}$
^(?:
# m/d or mm/dd
(1[0-2]|0?[1-9])/(3[01]|[12][0-9]|0?[1-9])
|
# d/m or dd/mm
(3[01]|[12][0-9]|0?[1-9])/(1[0-2]|0?[1-9])
)
# /yy or /yyyy
/(?:[0-9]{2})?[0-9]{2}$
According to the test strings you've presented, you can use the following regex
See this regex in use here
(?<=[^a-zA-Z\d.]|^)((?:\d{1,2}\s*[A-Z][a-z]{2}\s*\d+)|(?:(?:\d{1,2}\/){2}\d+)|(?:\d+(?:-\d{2}){2})|\d{2}\.\d{2})(?=[^a-zA-Z\d.])
This regex ensures that specific date formats are met and are preceded by nothing (beginning of the string) or by a non-word character (specifically a-z, A-Z, 0-9) or dot .. The date formats that will be matched are:
24 Aug 2016
24.16
9/23/16
The regex could be further manipulated to ensure numbers are in the proper range according to days/month, etc., however, I don't feel that is really necessary.
Edits
Edit 1
Since VBA doesn't support lookbehinds, you can use the following. The date is in capture group 1.
(?:[^a-zA-Z\d.]|^)((?:\d{1,2}\s*[A-Z][a-z]{2}\s*\d+)|(?:(?:\d{1,2}\/){2}\d+)|(?:\d+(?:-\d{2}){2})|\d{2}\.\d{2})(?=[^a-zA-Z\d.])
Edit 2
As per bulbus's comment below
(?:[^\w.]|^)((?:\d{1,2}\s*[A-Z][a-z]{2}\s*\d{2,4})|(?:(?:\d{1,2}\/){2}\d{2,4})|(?:\d{2,4}(?:-\d{2}){2})|\d{2}\.\d{2})
Took liberty to edit that a bit.
replaced [^a-zA-Z\d.] with [^\w.], comes with added advantage of excluding dates with _2016-07-28.log
Due to 1 removed trailing condition (?=[^a-zA-Z\d.]).
Forced year digits from \d+ to \d{2,4}
Edit 3
Due to added conditions of the regex, I've made the following edits (to improve upon both previous edits). As per the OP:
The edited pattern above works in all but 2 cases:
it does not find dates with the year first (ex. 2016/07/11)
if the date is contained within parenthesis in the string, it returns the left parenthesis as part of the date (ex. match = (8/20/2016)
Can you provide the edit to fix these?
In the below regexes, I've changed years to \d+ in order for it to work on any year greater than or equal to 0.
See the code in use here
(?:[^\w.]|^)((?:\d{1,2}\s+[A-Z][a-z]{2}\s+\d+)|(?:(?:\d{1,2}\/){2}\d+)|(?:\d+(?:\/\d{1,2}){2})|(?:\d+(?:-\d{2}){2})|\d{2}\.\d+)
This regex adds the possibility of dates in the XXXX/XX/XX format where the date may appear first.
The reason you are getting ( as a match before the regex is the nature of the Full Match. You need to, instead, grab the value of the first capture group and not the whole regex result. See this answer on how to grab submatches from a regex pattern in VBA.
Also, note that any additional date formats you need to catch need to be explicitly set in the regex. Currently, the regex supports the following date formats:
\d{1,2}\s+[A-Z][a-z]{2}\s+\d+
12 Apr 17
12 Apr 2017
(?:\d{1,2}\/){2}\d+
1/4/17
01/04/17
1/4/2017
01/04/2017
\d+(?:\/\d{1,2}){2}
17/04/01
2017/4/1
2017/04/01
17/4/1
\d+(?:-\d{2}){2}
17-04-01
2017-04-01
\d{2}\.\d+ - Although I'm not sure what this date format is even used for and how it could be considered efficient if it's missing month
24.16
I'm using some Regex to find date strings of the form Jan 12, 2015 or Feb 3, 1999.
The regex I'm using is \w+\s\d{1,2},\s\d{4} and it's working correctly, but the thing is that on the file are also some strings with the form:
Weg 58, 4047 or Strasse 1, 4482 and I also match them.
How can I avoid those non-date matches? My approach is:
The first string (the one of the month, Jan, Feb, etc.) has to have always length 3.
The year has to start with 1 or 2.
The thing is that I dont know how can I add these two options to my regex. Any help please?
You can make the test right here: https://regex101.com/r/bN2pO0/1
Thanks in advance.
Since the months won't change (ie: consistent values between January - Decemeber, we can put the 3 starting characters).
We can then use a OR | operator to select years starting with 1 or 2
/((Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Jun|Jul|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec)\s\d{1,2},\s(1|2)\d{3})/ig
https://regex101.com/r/bN2pO0/3
Just as you used \d{1,2} to match a digit 1 or 2 times and \d{4} to match a digit 4 times, you can use \w{3} to match a word character 3 times.
For the year, you can use the pipe "or" operator |.
\w{3}\s\d{1,2},\s(?:1|2)\d{3}
Although, this will also match non-dates of form Abc xy, 1xyz
If you want, you can go with brute force approach or just get rid of regex and use code to capture the dates.
Brute force:
(?:Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Jun|Jul|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec)\s[0-2]?[0-9],\s[12]\d{3}
I'm tasked to capture date for itineraries in email message, but the dates given were all in different formats, I guess I need help to find out if there's any way to capture the following formats:
02 APR
APR 02
2 APR
APR 2
2nd APR
APR 2nd
2nd April
April 2nd
APR 12th
April 12th
12th April
April 13-16
13-16 April
APR 13-16
13-16 APR
April 13th-16th
13th-16th April
APR 13th-16th
13th-16th APR
I've tried numerous ways but just could not understand or fathom as I'm a
newbie to regex.
The closest I could get was using this:
(\d*)-(\d*) APR|April \d*\d*
EDIT- Found out that i`ve missed some more formats.
13th - 16th APR
13~16 April
13/16 APR
I`ve tried using the following:
(Jan(?:uary)?|Feb(?:ruary)?|Mar(?:ch)?|Apr(?:il)?|May|Jun(?:e)?|Jul(?:y)?|Aug(?:ust)?|Sep(?:tember)?|Oct(?:ober)?|Nov(?:ember)?|Dec(?:ember)?)\ *\d+(?:[nr]d|th|st)?(?: * \d+(?:[nr]d|th|st)?)?|\d+(?:[nr]d|th|st)?(?: . \d+(?:[nr]d|th|st)?)?\ *(?:Jan(?:uary)?|Feb(?:ruary)?|Mar(?:ch)?|Apr(?:il)?|May|Jun(?:e)?|Jul(?:y)?|Aug(?:ust)?|Sep(?:tember)?|Oct(?:ober)?|Nov(?:ember)?|Dec(?:ember)?)
Could either capture dates with space or without space.
Is there a way to capture all formats, and split the dates with '-', '/','~' and output/write into a single standardize format?
(Group 1 Date)-Month (Group 2 Date)-Month eg: 13-Apr 16-Apr
Appreciate for your kind suggestions and comments.
You need to account for optional values. Here is an enhanced version matching your sample input:
/(\d+)(?:st|[nr]d|th)?-?(\d*)(?:st|[nr]d|th)?\s*Apr(?:il)?|Apr(?:il)?\s*(\d+)(?:st|[nr]d|th)?-?(\d*)(?:st|[nr]d|th)?/i
See the regex demo (note you need to use a case-insensitive modifier to match any variants of April)
Basically, there are 2 alternatives matching April and date ranges:
(\d+)(?:st|[nr]d|th)?-?(\d*)(?:st|[nr]d|th)?\s*Apr(?:il)? - 1+ digits followed with an optional st, nd, rd, th, followed with an optional hyphen, followed with 0+ digits, followed with optional st, etc. followed with 0+ whitespace and then Apr or April (case insensitive due to /i modifier)
| - or
Apr(?:il)?\s*(\d+)(?:st|[nr]d|th)?-?(\d*)(?:st|[nr]d|th)? - the same as above but swapped.
I came up with this Regex:
(?:APR|April)\ *\d+(?:[nr]d|th|st)?(?:-\d+(?:[nr]d|th|st)?)?|\d+(?:[nr]d|th|st)?(?:-\d+(?:[nr]d|th|st)?)?\ *(?:APR|April)
See details here: Regex101
Maybe it's overkill, but I came up with this regex that will match with any month:
(?:January|JAN|February|FEB|March|MAR|April|APR|May|MAY|June|JUN|July|JUL|August|AUG|September|SEP|October|OCT|November|NOV|December|DEC)\ *\d+(?:[nr]d|th|st)?(?:-\d+(?:[nr]d|th|st)?)?|\d+(?:[nr]d|th|st)?(?:-\d+(?:[nr]d|th|st)?)?\ *(?:January|JAN|February|FEB|March|MAR|April|APR|May|MAY|June|JUN|July|JUL|August|AUG|September|SEP|October|OCT|November|NOV|December|DEC)
Unreadable, check here if you want details: Regex101
Improved version using Wiktor Stribiżew's trick:
(?:Jan(?:uary)?|Feb(?:ruary)?|Mar(?:ch)?|Apr(?:il)?|May|Jun(?:e)?|Jul(?:y)?|Aug(?:ust)?|Sep(?:tember)?|Oct(?:ober)?|Nov(?:ember)?|Dec(?:ember)?)\ *\d+(?:[nr]d|th|st)?(?:-\d+(?:[nr]d|th|st)?)?|\d+(?:[nr]d|th|st)?(?:-\d+(?:[nr]d|th|st)?)?\ *(?:Jan(?:uary)?|Feb(?:ruary)?|Mar(?:ch)?|Apr(?:il)?|May|Jun(?:e)?|Jul(?:y)?|Aug(?:ust)?|Sep(?:tember)?|Oct(?:ober)?|Nov(?:ember)?|Dec(?:ember)?)
See details here: Regex101
It matches every monthes, it uses less steps (more efficient)
BUT, you need to make sure you're case insensitive
I came up with this:
(\d+(?:th|st|[nr]d)?(?:-\d+(?:th|st|[nr]d)?)?\s*(?:APR|April))|((?:APR|April)\s*\d+(?:th|st|[nr]d)?(?:-\d+(?:th|st|[nr]d)?)?)
Live Demo