So I am trying to parse through a file which has multiple "footers" (the file is an output that was designed for printing which my company wants to keep electronically stored...each footer is a new page and the new page is no longer needed as).
I am trying to look for and remove lines that look like:
1 of 2122 PRINTED 07/01/2013 04:46 Page : 1 of 11
2 of 2122 PRINTED 07/01/2013 04:46 Page: 2 of 11
3 of 2122 PRINTED 07/01/2013 04:46 Page: 3 of 11
and so on
I then want to replace the final line (which would read something like "2122 of 2122") with a "custom" footer.
I am using RegEx, but am very new to using it so how should my RegEx look in order to accomplish this? I plan on using the RegEx "count" function to find out when I've found the last line and then do a .replace on it.
I am using VB .NET, but can translate C# if required. How can I accomplish what I'm looking to do? Specifically I only care about matching/removing of a match so long as the # of matches > 1.
Here's one I created with RegExr:
/^(\d+\s+of\s+\d+)(?=\s+printed)/gim
It matches (number)(space)('of')(space)(number) at the beginning of a line, and only if it is followed by (space)('printed'), case insensitive. The /m flag turns ^ and $ into line-aware boundaries.
This is how I ended up doing it...
Private Function FixFooters(ByVal fileInput As String, Optional ByVal numberToLeaveAlone As Integer = 1) As String
Dim matchpattern As String = "^\d+\W+of\W+\d+\W+PRINTED.*$"
Dim myRegEx As New Regex(matchpattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase Or RegexOptions.Multiline)
Dim replacementstring As String = String.Empty
Dim matchCounter As Integer = myRegEx.Matches(fileInput).Count
If numberToLeaveAlone > matchCounter Then numberToLeaveAlone = matchCounter
Return myRegEx.Replace(fileInput, replacementstring, matchCounter - numberToLeaveAlone, 0)
End Function
I used myregextester.com to get the inital matchpattern. Since I wanted to leave the last footer alone (to manipulate it further later on) I created the numberToLeaveAlone variable to ensure we don't remove ALL of the variables. For the purposes of this program I made the default value 1, but that could be changed to zero (I only did it for readability in the calling code as I know I will ALWAYS want to leave one...but I do like to reuse code). It's fairly fast, I'm sure there are better ways out there, but this one made the most sense to me.
Related
I made a regex which inserts a space where ever there is any of the characters
-:\*_/;, present for example JET*AIRWAYS\INDIA/858701/IDBI 05/05/05;05:05:05 a/c should beJET* AIRWAYS\ INDIA/ 858701/ IDBI 05/05/05; 05:05:05 a/c
The regex I used is (?!a\/c|w\/d|m\/s|s\/w|m\/o)(\D-|\D:|\D\*|\D_|\D\\|\D\/|\D\;)
I have added some words exceptions like a/c w/d etc. \D conditions given to avoid date/time values getting separated, but this created an issue, the numbers followed by the above mentioned characters never get split.
My requirement is
1. Insert a space after characters -:\*_/;,
2. but date and time should not get split which may have / :
3. need exception on words like a/c w/d
The following is the full code
Private Function formatColon(oldString As String) As String
Dim reg As New RegExp: reg.Global = True: reg.Pattern = "(?!a\/c|w\/d|m\/s|s\/w|m\/o)(\D-|\D:|\D\*|\D_|\D\\|\D\/|\D\;)" '"(\D:|\D/|\D-|^w/d)"
Dim newString As String: newString = reg.Replace(oldString, "$1 ")
formatColon = XtraspaceKill(newString)
End Function
I would use 3 replacements.
Replace all date and time special characters with a special macro that should never be found in your text, e.g. for 05/15/2018 4:06 PM, something based on your name:
05MANUMOHANSLASH15MANUMOHANSLASH2018 4MANUMOHANCOLON06 PM
You can encode exceptions too, like this:
aMANUMOHANSLASHc
Now run your original regex to replace all special characters.
Finally, unreplace the macros MANUMOHANSLASH and MANUMOHANCOLON.
Meanwhile, let me tell you why this is complicated in a single regex.
If trying to do this in a single regex, you have to ask, for each / or :, "Am I a part of a date or time?"
To answer that, you need to use lookahead and lookbehind assertions, the latter of which Microsoft has finally added support for.
But given a /, you don't know if you're between the first and second, or second and third parts of the date. Similar for time.
The number of cases you need to consider will render your regex unmaintainably complex.
So please just use a few separate replacements :-)
I wish to select and add comments after certain words, e.g. “not”, “never”, “don’t” in sentences in a Word document with VBA. The Find/Replace with wildcards works fine, but “Use wildcards” cannot be selected with “Match case”. The RegEx can “IgnoreCase=True”, but the selection of the word is not reliable when there are more than one comments in a sentence. The Range.start seems to be getting modified in a way that I cannot understand.
A similar question was asked in June 2010. https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/f73ca32d-0af9-47cf-81fe-ce93b13ebc4d/regex-selecting-a-match-within-the-document?forum=worddev
Is there a new/different way of solving this problem?
Any suggestion will be appreciated.
The code using RegEx follows:
Function zRegExCommentor(zPhrase As String, tComment As String) As Long
Dim sTheseSentences As Sentences
Dim rThisSentenceToSearch As Word.Range, rThisSentenceResult As Word.Range
Dim myRegExp As RegExp
Dim myMatches As MatchCollection
Options.CommentsColor = wdByAuthor
Set myRegExp = New RegExp
With myRegExp
.IgnoreCase = True
.Global = False
.Pattern = zPhrase
End With
Set sTheseSentences = ActiveDocument.Sentences
For Each rThisSentenceToSearch In sTheseSentences
Set rThisSentenceResult = rThisSentenceToSearch.Duplicate
rThisSentenceResult.Select
Do
DoEvents
Set myMatches = myRegExp.Execute(rThisSentenceResult)
If myMatches.Count > 0 Then
rThisSentenceResult.Start = rThisSentenceResult.Start + myMatches(0).FirstIndex
rThisSentenceResult.End = rThisSentenceResult.Start + myMatches(0).Length
rThisSentenceResult.Select
Selection.Comments.Add Range:=Selection.Range
Selection.TypeText Text:=tComment & "{" & zPhrase & "}"
rThisSentenceResult.Start = rThisSentenceResult.Start + 1 'so as not to find the same phrase again and again
rThisSentenceResult.End = rThisSentenceToSearch.End
rThisSentenceResult.Select
End If 'If myMatches.Count > 0 Then
Loop While myMatches.Count > 0
Next 'For Each rThisSentenceToSearch In sTheseSentences
End Function
Relying on Range.Start or Range.End for position in a Word document is not reliable due to how Word stores non-printing information in the text flow. For some kinds of things you can work around it using Range.TextRetrievalMode, but the non-printing characters inserted by Comments aren't affected by these settings.
I must admit I don't understand why Word's built-in Find with wildcards won't work for you - no case matching shouldn't be a problem. For instance, based on the example: "Never has there been, never, NEVER, a total drought.":
FindText:="[n,N][e,E][v,V][e,E][r,R]"
Will find all instances of n-e-v-e-r regardless of the capitalization. The brackets let you define a range of values, in this case the combination of lower and upper case for each letter in the search term.
The workarounds described in my MSDN post you link to are pretty much all you can if you insist on RegEx:
Using the Office Open XML (or possibly Word 2003 XML) file format will let you use RegEx and standard XML processing tools to find the information, add comment "tags" into the Word XML, close it all up... And when the user sees the document it will all be there.
If you need to be doing this in the Word UI a slightly different approach should work (assuming you're targeting Word 2003 or later): Work through the document on a range-by-range basis (by paragraph, perhaps). Read the XML representation of the text into memory using the Range.WordOpenXML property, perform the RegEx search, add comments as WordOpenXML, then write the WordOpenXML back into the document using the InserXml method, replacing the original range (paragraph). Since you'd be working with the Paragraph object Range.Start won't be a factor.
I am fairly new at VB and I need to write a function checking whether or not an ID is following the write pattern.
The pattern should be the letters ORG, accompanied by a - and then 1 to an infinite numbers of digits (ORG-1 or ORG-15793131354).
This is my code right now :
Sub CheckIdPattern
If MyFolder.Fields("USERTEXT221").value IsNot Nothing Then
Dim sId as String = MyFolder.Fields("USERTEXT221").value
Dim sMatch as Boolean = sId Like("ORG-#*")
If sMatch = False Then
Throw new exception("The ID entered is invalid, please use an ID starting with ORG- followed by numbers only")
End if
End if
End sub
As you can see I'm currently using "ORG-#*" which at least validate the beginning of the string, but permits to have any other characters at the end, causing bugs later in the program when we go and read these ID.
I also tried using System.Text.RegularExpressions (maybe not correctly though) but it failed because (I think) I can't import it in the program (I only have access to a small portion of the code and the rest is blocked by the software provider).
I know it seems like a pretty basic question so sorry for that and, thanks you very much for any help !
You can access the Regex.IsMatch method using a fully qualified name. Then, this code will do the trick for you:
Dim sId as String = "ORG-15793131354"
Dim sMatch as Boolean = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.IsMatch(sId, "^ORG-\d+$")
If sMatch = False Then
Throw new exception("The ID entered is invalid, please use an ID starting with ORG- followed by numbers only")
End if
See IDEONE demo
The regex - "^ORG-\d+$" - matches ORG at the beginning of the string, then -, and then 1 or more digits up to the end of the string.
Perhaps you could check each character after your ORG- matching, using a for loop:
For i = 4 To sid.length
If Not(sid[i]>'0' And sid[i]<'9') Then
'throw your exception
End If
Next
I would like to know how to include only 2 or more keywords within a Regex. and ending results should only show those words defined, not only one word.
What I currently have works with multiple keywords but I want it to use BOTH words not either one of the other.
For example:
Dim pattern As String = "(?i)[\t ](?<w>((arma)|(crapo))[a-z0-9]*)[\t ]"
Now the code works fine by including 'arma' or 'crapo'. I only want it to include BOTH 'arma' AND 'crapo' otherwise do not show any results.
Dealing with finding certain keywords within a PDF document and I only want to be shown results if the PDF document includes BOTH 'arma' and 'crapo' (Works fine by showing results for 'arma' OR 'crapo' I want to see results based on 'arma' AND 'crapo'.
Sorry for sounding so repetitive.
Edit: Here is my code. Please read comment.
Dim filesz() As String = GetPatternedFiles("c:\temp\", New String() {"tes*.pdf", "fes*.pdf", "Bas*.pdf"})
'The getpatterenedfiles is a function" also gettextfromPDF is another function.
For Each s As String In filesz
Dim thetext As String = Nothing
Dim pattern As String = "(?i)[\t ](?<w>(crapo)|(arma)[a-z0-9]*)[\t ]"
thetext = GetTextFromPDF(s)
For Each m As Match In Regex.Matches(thetext, pattern)
ListBox1.Items.Add(s)
Next
Next
You can use this regex:
\barma\b.*?\bcrapo\b|\bcrapo\b.*?\barma\b
Working demo
The idea is to match arma whatever crapo or crapo whatever arma and use word boundaries to avoid words like karma.
However, if you want to match karma or crapotos as you asked in your comment you can use:
arma.*?crapo|crapo.*?arma
I've a word document where I want to find all the words as have the following layout: ABC-12:123456 DEF. Where this is found in the document the word should be selected and put in bold. (Later i'll add a hyperlink instead of bold). I have successfully found the word and put it in a MatchCollection just to try RegExp. It looks like:
Sub searchDocument()
Set matchPattern = New RegExp
matchPattern.Pattern = "ABC-\d{2}:\d{6} DEF"
matchPattern.Global = True
Dim matchPatternWords As MatchCollection
Set matchPatternWords = matchPattern.Execute(ActiveDocument.Range)
For Each matchPatternWord In matchPatternWords
MsgBox (matchPatternWord)
Next matchPatternWord
End Sub
You need to go from the regexp match to the range object representing the match.
matchRange = ActiveDocument.Range
(matchPatternWord.FirstIndex, matchPatternWord.FirstIndex+matchPatternWord.Length)
would be the obvious invocation.
However this post indicates that there might be issues with this approach, because formating can mess up the character count. It's from 2010 though so the issue might be resolved in a better way now.
If the above doesn't work, or if you don't trust it you can do;
matchRange = ActiveDocument.Range.Find(FindText:=matchPatternWord.Value)
The latter needs a bit more handeling if multiple occurences of the same word is a possibility.
Once you have the range it's straight forward.
matchRange.Bold = True