Extract text with regex between "," - regex

Question

I have been struggling making a regex to extract the information in below divided in 3 part between the ",". Only the first and second sequence (Friday and the date has succeded).
Friday, 26 Apr 2013, 18:30
I hope someone has the experience.
Best regards

Answer 1

Why not simply split the string and trim the excess whitespace of the individual parts? For example, verbosely written in C#:
string input = "Friday, 26 Apr 2013, 18:30";
string[] parts = input.Split(',');
for (int i = 0; i < parts.Length; i++)
{
parts[i] = parts[i].Trim();
}
Console.WriteLine(parts[0]); // "Friday"
Console.WriteLine(parts[1]); // "26 Apr 2013"
Console.WriteLine(parts[2]); // "18:30"
If you really want to use a regular expression for this, ^(.*),(.*),(.*)$ should work:
string input = "Friday, 26 Apr 2013, 18:30";
Regex regex = new Regex("^(.*),(.*),(.*)$", RegexOptions.Singleline);
Match match = regex.Match(input);
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups[1].Value.Trim()); // "Friday"
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups[2].Value.Trim()); // "26 Apr 2013"
Console.WriteLine(match.Groups[3].Value.Trim()); // "18:30"
Adding appropriate error checking is left as an exercise for the reader.

Answer 2

The following Regex expression is matching this whole part :
, 18:30
I hope someone has the experience.
Best regards
,+\s[0-9]+:[0-9]+ \r*.*
But yeah, that's kind of ultra specific to this ", Hour:Minuts [...]" format. You should do a split if you're using PHP or the equivalent in your language.

Answer 3

I think what you really want is something like this:
from datetime import datetime
s="Friday, 26 Apr 2013, 18:30"
d=datetime.strptime(s, "%A, %d %b %Y, %H:%M")
d
Out[7]: datetime.datetime(2013, 4, 26, 18, 30)
See the strptime and date format docs for details :)
Edit: sorry, I was somehow assuming you were using Python. Other languages have similar idioms though, e.g. PHP's date_parse, C#'s DateTime.Parse, etc.

Answer 4

You didn't specify a language so I'm going to answer this with a standard REGEX approach.
(?<=(^|,\s+)).+?(?=(,|$)) Will work for you.
Let me break up what it's doing.
(?<=(^|,\s+) - Look ahead for the start of a string or a comma followed by whitespace, but don't include it in the match. All matches must have this in front of them.
.+? - Grab all characters, but don't be greedy.
(?=(,|$)) - Look behind for the end of string or a comma. All matches must have this behind them.
When ran on your test case of Friday, 26 Apr 2013, 18:30, I get 3 matches:
Friday
26 Apr 2013
18:30

Answer 5

Like m01's answer, you could try this approach with C#:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Globalization;
namespace TestDate
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
string dateString = "Friday, 26 Apr 2013, 18:30"; // Modified from MSDN
string format = "dddd, dd MMM yyyy, HH:mm";
DateTime dateTime = DateTime.ParseExact(dateString, format, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
Console.WriteLine(dateTime);
Console.Read();
}
}
}
This will print out the localized date and time that is configured on the user's machine. For me it printed out 4/16/2013 6:30:00 PM.