I am having trouble matching the pattern, "This program cannot be run" whenever the phrase is broken over multiple lines, e.g.:
This program cannot be run
T
his program cannot be run
Thi
s program cannot be run
.
.
This pr
ogram cannot be run
The pattern can be split onto two lines at any point. I have tried using /m and /s as well as anchors and boundaries but I cannot get it to work. I am at a loss as to what I am doing wrong. I even tried using \s after every character and even that won't match! The pattern must be PCRE formatted.
s and m won't help you here. They only change the behavior of . and anchors, respectively. Anchors and boundaries won't help either, because they only assert that something is at a certain position.
The problem with all those approaches is that a line break introduces one or two new characters into the string (\n, \r or \r\n, depending on your system). Therefore, you will would have to allow a line break at any possible point if you need a regex only solution:
/T[\r\n]*h[\r\n]*i[\r\n]*s[\r\n]* [\r\n]*p[\r\n]*.../
And so on.
If you can modify the input, it would be easier to remove line breaks first by replacing
/[\r\n]+/
with an empty string and then running the pattern you already have.
If a newline character can appear at any point in the sought substring, you will need to add a corresponding character to match that newline in the regex.
Assuming the newline characters are always \n
T\n?h\n?i\n?s\n? \n?p\n?r\n?o\n?g\n?r\n?a\n?m\n? \n?c\n?a\n?n\n?n\n?o\n?t\n? \n?b\n?e\n? \n?r\n?u\n?n
so it looks horrible, and maybe someone can offer a better solution, here it is in python using the re.S flag
>>> a = """
... This pr
... ogram cannot be run"""
>>> re.search("T[\n]*h[\n]*i[\n]*s[\n]* [\n]*p[\n]*r[\n]*o[\n]*",a,re.S)
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x7f9d746e9e68>
The easy way to make the regex if your string changes
>>> a = "This program cannot be run"
>>> b = list(a)
>>> r = '[\r\n]*'.join(b)
Related
I have a text file where lines are trimmed by newline characters /n and paragraphs by double newlines /n/n
I want to strip out those single newlines and replace with simple spaces. But I do not want the double newlines affected.
I thought something like one of these would work:
(?!\n\n)\n
\n{1}
\n{1,1}
But no luck. Everything I try inevitably ends up affecting those double new lines too. How can I write a regex that effectively "ignores" the /n/n but captures the /n
You can search using this regex:
(.)\n(?!\n)
And replace it with:
"\1 "
RegEx Demo
RegEx Breakup:
.\n: Match any character followed by a line break
(?!\n): Negative lookahead to assert that we don't have a line break at next position. We match one character before matching \n to make sure we don't match an empty line. Also note that this character is being captured in capture group #1. This will match all single line breaks but will skip double line breaks.
\1 : is replacement to append a space after first capture group
Python Code:
import re
repl = re.sub('(.)\n(?!\n)', r'\1 ', input)
print (repl)
Javscript Code:
repl = input.replace(/(.)\n(?!\n)/g, '$1 ')
console.log (repl)
You'll need a negative lookahead and a negative lookbehind. /(?<!\n)\n(?!\n)/g would probably work off the top of my head.
That said, you should be aware of kind of spotty browser support for lookbehinds. It's gotten better since I last checked, but Safari and IE don't support it at all.
I thought of a simple way to do this.(may not be the right way from a regex point of view) but its a workaround.
import re
sample = """This is a sentence in para1.
this is also a sentence in para1
The begining of paragraph2 and sentence1
this is a second line in paragraph2.
"""
print(sample)
sample = re.sub(r'\n\n\n',"NPtag",sample)
sample = re.sub(r'\n\n'," ",sample)
sample = re.sub(r"NPtag",'\n\n\n',sample)
print("OUTPUT*****\n")
print(sample)
the workaround is to replace the multi-line(3 in this case to demonstrate the space clearly) breaker with a NewParagraphtag(NPtag) and then substitute the single newline(2 in the above case, to demonstrate the sapce clearly in notebook env) with space and resubstitute the NPtag with multiline break. You can see the output here as:
Hope this helps. Eager to see other regex answers too! Happy coding
This question already has answers here:
Regular expression to match a line that doesn't contain a word
(34 answers)
Closed 2 years ago.
I know that I can negate group of chars as in [^bar] but I need a regular expression where negation applies to the specific word - so in my example how do I negate an actual bar, and not "any chars in bar"?
A great way to do this is to use negative lookahead:
^(?!.*bar).*$
The negative lookahead construct is the pair of parentheses, with the opening parenthesis followed by a question mark and an exclamation point. Inside the lookahead [is any regex pattern].
Unless performance is of utmost concern, it's often easier just to run your results through a second pass, skipping those that match the words you want to negate.
Regular expressions usually mean you're doing scripting or some sort of low-performance task anyway, so find a solution that is easy to read, easy to understand and easy to maintain.
Solution:
^(?!.*STRING1|.*STRING2|.*STRING3).*$
xxxxxx OK
xxxSTRING1xxx KO (is whether it is desired)
xxxSTRING2xxx KO (is whether it is desired)
xxxSTRING3xxx KO (is whether it is desired)
You could either use a negative look-ahead or look-behind:
^(?!.*?bar).*
^(.(?<!bar))*?$
Or use just basics:
^(?:[^b]+|b(?:$|[^a]|a(?:$|[^r])))*$
These all match anything that does not contain bar.
The following regex will do what you want (as long as negative lookbehinds and lookaheads are supported), matching things properly; the only problem is that it matches individual characters (i.e. each match is a single character rather than all characters between two consecutive "bar"s), possibly resulting in a potential for high overhead if you're working with very long strings.
b(?!ar)|(?<!b)a|a(?!r)|(?<!ba)r|[^bar]
I came across this forum thread while trying to identify a regex for the following English statement:
Given an input string, match everything unless this input string is exactly 'bar'; for example I want to match 'barrier' and 'disbar' as well as 'foo'.
Here's the regex I came up with
^(bar.+|(?!bar).*)$
My English translation of the regex is "match the string if it starts with 'bar' and it has at least one other character, or if the string does not start with 'bar'.
The accepted answer is nice but is really a work-around for the lack of a simple sub-expression negation operator in regexes. This is why grep --invert-match exits. So in *nixes, you can accomplish the desired result using pipes and a second regex.
grep 'something I want' | grep --invert-match 'but not these ones'
Still a workaround, but maybe easier to remember.
If it's truly a word, bar that you don't want to match, then:
^(?!.*\bbar\b).*$
The above will match any string that does not contain bar that is on a word boundary, that is to say, separated from non-word characters. However, the period/dot (.) used in the above pattern will not match newline characters unless the correct regex flag is used:
^(?s)(?!.*\bbar\b).*$
Alternatively:
^(?!.*\bbar\b)[\s\S]*$
Instead of using any special flag, we are looking for any character that is either white space or non-white space. That should cover every character.
But what if we would like to match words that might contain bar, but just not the specific word bar?
(?!\bbar\b)\b\[A-Za-z-]*bar[a-z-]*\b
(?!\bbar\b) Assert that the next input is not bar on a word boundary.
\b\[A-Za-z-]*bar[a-z-]*\b Matches any word on a word boundary that contains bar.
See Regex Demo
Extracted from this comment by bkDJ:
^(?!bar$).*
The nice property of this solution is that it's possible to clearly negate (exclude) multiple words:
^(?!bar$|foo$|banana$).*
I wish to complement the accepted answer and contribute to the discussion with my late answer.
#ChrisVanOpstal shared this regex tutorial which is a great resource for learning regex.
However, it was really time consuming to read through.
I made a cheatsheet for mnemonic convenience.
This reference is based on the braces [], (), and {} leading each class, and I find it easy to recall.
Regex = {
'single_character': ['[]', '.', {'negate':'^'}],
'capturing_group' : ['()', '|', '\\', 'backreferences and named group'],
'repetition' : ['{}', '*', '+', '?', 'greedy v.s. lazy'],
'anchor' : ['^', '\b', '$'],
'non_printable' : ['\n', '\t', '\r', '\f', '\v'],
'shorthand' : ['\d', '\w', '\s'],
}
Just thought of something else that could be done. It's very different from my first answer, as it doesn't use regular expressions, so I decided to make a second answer post.
Use your language of choice's split() method equivalent on the string with the word to negate as the argument for what to split on. An example using Python:
>>> text = 'barbarasdbarbar 1234egb ar bar32 sdfbaraadf'
>>> text.split('bar')
['', '', 'asd', '', ' 1234egb ar ', '32 sdf', 'aadf']
The nice thing about doing it this way, in Python at least (I don't remember if the functionality would be the same in, say, Visual Basic or Java), is that it lets you know indirectly when "bar" was repeated in the string due to the fact that the empty strings between "bar"s are included in the list of results (though the empty string at the beginning is due to there being a "bar" at the beginning of the string). If you don't want that, you can simply remove the empty strings from the list.
I had a list of file names, and I wanted to exclude certain ones, with this sort of behavior (Ruby):
files = [
'mydir/states.rb', # don't match these
'countries.rb',
'mydir/states_bkp.rb', # match these
'mydir/city_states.rb'
]
excluded = ['states', 'countries']
# set my_rgx here
result = WankyAPI.filter(files, my_rgx) # I didn't write WankyAPI...
assert result == ['mydir/city_states.rb', 'mydir/states_bkp.rb']
Here's my solution:
excluded_rgx = excluded.map{|e| e+'\.'}.join('|')
my_rgx = /(^|\/)((?!#{excluded_rgx})[^\.\/]*)\.rb$/
My assumptions for this application:
The string to be excluded is at the beginning of the input, or immediately following a slash.
The permitted strings end with .rb.
Permitted filenames don't have a . character before the .rb.
I want to match two lines like the following using a Regular Expression:-
abcmnoxyz
=========
The first line is essentially random, the second line will be all the same character of a limited number of possibles (=, - and maybe a couple more). The lines can probably be required to be the same length but it would be nice if they didn't have to be. It would be OK to have multiple REs, one for each possible 'underline' character.
Can anyone come up with a way to do this?
This regex should do what you're trying to do :
regex = "(.*)\n(.)\2{2,}$"
group 1 will give you the line before the repeated linet
Live demo here
EXPLANATION
(.*)\n: match anything followed by a new line
(.)\2{2,} : capture something then check if its followed by same character 2+ more no. of times. You don't need to worry about which character is repeated.
In case you've a set of characters that can be repeated you can put a character set like this : [=-] instead of dot (.)
Use Grep's -B Flag
Matching with Alternation
Given your example, you can use extended regular expressions with alternations and a range operator. The -B flag tells grep how many lines before the match to include in the output.
$ grep -E -B1 '^(={5,}|-{5,})$' sample.txt
abcmnoxyz
=========
You can add alternations for additional characters if you want, although boundary markers ought to be as consistent as you can make them. You can also adjust the minimum number of sequential characters required for a match to suit your needs. I used a five-character range in the example because that's what was posted as the criterion in your original topic sentence, and because a shorter boundary marker is more likely to accidentally match truly random text.
Matching with a Character Class
Also, note that the following does the same job, but is a bit more concise. It uses a character class and a backreference to avoid alternations, which can get messy if you add many more boundary characters. Both versions are equally effective at matching your example.
$ grep -E -B1 '^([=-])\1{4,}$'
abcmnoxyz
========
A regex like this
^([^=\v]+)\v=+$
will do. Check it out at example 1
Explanation:
^([^=\v]+) # 1 or more matches of anything that is not a '=' or vertical space \v
\v=+$ # match a vertical space followed by 1 or more '='
If you want to extend this to more characters like '-' you could do this:
^([^=\-\v]+)\v(-|=)\2+$
Look at example 2
And, thanks to Ashish Ranjan, suppose you wanted to have = and/or - on the first line, use something like this:
^(.+)\v(-|=)\2+$
which would even allow you to have a first line like "=====". Having my doubts if OP had this in mind, though. Look at example 3
Hope this works
^([a-z]{1,})\n([=-]{1,})
\n and \r you have try both based on file format (unix or dos)
\1 will give you first line
\2 will give you second line
If the file contains same pattern over the text, then it might give you lot occurrence.
This answer is irrespective of number of characters in one line.
Ex: Tester
This question already has answers here:
Regular expression to match a line that doesn't contain a word
(34 answers)
Closed 6 years ago.
Ok, so this is something completely stupid but this is something I simply never learned to do and its a hassle.
How do I specify a string that does not contain a sequence of other characters. For example I want to match all lines that do NOT end in '.config'
I would think that I could just do
.*[^(\.config)]$
but this doesn't work (why not?)
I know I can do
.*[^\.][^c][^o][^n][^f][^i][^g]$
but please please please tell me that there is a better way
You can use negative lookbehind, e.g.:
.*(?<!\.config)$
This matches all strings except those that end with ".config"
Your question contains two questions, so here are a few answers.
Match lines that don't contain a certain string (say .config) at all:
^(?:(?!\.config).)*$\r?\n?
Match lines that don't end in a certain string:
^.*(?<!\.config)$\r?\n?
and, as a bonus: Match lines that don't start with a certain string:
^(?!\.config).*$\r?\n?
(each time including newline characters, if present.
Oh, and to answer why your version doesn't work: [^abc] means "any one (1) character except a, b, or c". Your other solution would also fail on test.hg (because it also ends in the letter g - your regex looks at each character individually instead of the entire .config string. That's why you need lookaround to handle this.
(?<!\.config)$
:)
By using the [^] construct, you have created a negated character class, which matches all characters except those you have named. Order of characters in the candidate match do not matter, so this will fail on any string that has any of [(\.config) (or [)gi.\onc(])
Use negative lookahead, (with perl regexs) like so: (?!\.config$). This will match all strings that do not match the literal ".config"
Unless you are "grepping" ... since you are not using the result of a match, why not search for the strings that do end in .config and skip them? In Python:
import re
isConfig = re.compile('\.config$')
# List lst is given
filteredList = [f.strip() for f in lst if not isConfig.match(f.strip())]
I suspect that this will run faster than a more complex re.
As you have asked for a "better way": I would try a "filtering" approach. I think it is quite easy to read and to understand:
#!/usr/bin/perl
while(<>) {
next if /\.config$/; # ignore the line if it ends with ".config"
print;
}
As you can see I have used perl code as an example. But I think you get the idea?
added:
this approach could also be used to chain up more filter patterns and it still remains good readable and easy to understand,
next if /\.config$/; # ignore the line if it ends with ".config"
next if /\.ini$/; # ignore the line if it ends with ".ini"
next if /\.reg$/; # ignore the line if it ends with ".reg"
# now we have filtered out all the lines we want to skip
... process only the lines we want to use ...
I used Regexpal before finding this page and came up with the following solution when I wanted to check that a string doesn't contain a file extension:
^(.(?!\.[a-zA-Z0-9]{3,}))*$ I used the m checkbox option so that I could present many lines and see which of them did or did not match.
so to find a string that doesn't contain another "^(.(?!" + expression you don't want + "))*$"
My article on the uses of this particular regex
This question already has answers here:
Regular expression to match a line that doesn't contain a word
(34 answers)
Closed 2 years ago.
I know that I can negate group of chars as in [^bar] but I need a regular expression where negation applies to the specific word - so in my example how do I negate an actual bar, and not "any chars in bar"?
A great way to do this is to use negative lookahead:
^(?!.*bar).*$
The negative lookahead construct is the pair of parentheses, with the opening parenthesis followed by a question mark and an exclamation point. Inside the lookahead [is any regex pattern].
Unless performance is of utmost concern, it's often easier just to run your results through a second pass, skipping those that match the words you want to negate.
Regular expressions usually mean you're doing scripting or some sort of low-performance task anyway, so find a solution that is easy to read, easy to understand and easy to maintain.
Solution:
^(?!.*STRING1|.*STRING2|.*STRING3).*$
xxxxxx OK
xxxSTRING1xxx KO (is whether it is desired)
xxxSTRING2xxx KO (is whether it is desired)
xxxSTRING3xxx KO (is whether it is desired)
You could either use a negative look-ahead or look-behind:
^(?!.*?bar).*
^(.(?<!bar))*?$
Or use just basics:
^(?:[^b]+|b(?:$|[^a]|a(?:$|[^r])))*$
These all match anything that does not contain bar.
The following regex will do what you want (as long as negative lookbehinds and lookaheads are supported), matching things properly; the only problem is that it matches individual characters (i.e. each match is a single character rather than all characters between two consecutive "bar"s), possibly resulting in a potential for high overhead if you're working with very long strings.
b(?!ar)|(?<!b)a|a(?!r)|(?<!ba)r|[^bar]
I came across this forum thread while trying to identify a regex for the following English statement:
Given an input string, match everything unless this input string is exactly 'bar'; for example I want to match 'barrier' and 'disbar' as well as 'foo'.
Here's the regex I came up with
^(bar.+|(?!bar).*)$
My English translation of the regex is "match the string if it starts with 'bar' and it has at least one other character, or if the string does not start with 'bar'.
The accepted answer is nice but is really a work-around for the lack of a simple sub-expression negation operator in regexes. This is why grep --invert-match exits. So in *nixes, you can accomplish the desired result using pipes and a second regex.
grep 'something I want' | grep --invert-match 'but not these ones'
Still a workaround, but maybe easier to remember.
If it's truly a word, bar that you don't want to match, then:
^(?!.*\bbar\b).*$
The above will match any string that does not contain bar that is on a word boundary, that is to say, separated from non-word characters. However, the period/dot (.) used in the above pattern will not match newline characters unless the correct regex flag is used:
^(?s)(?!.*\bbar\b).*$
Alternatively:
^(?!.*\bbar\b)[\s\S]*$
Instead of using any special flag, we are looking for any character that is either white space or non-white space. That should cover every character.
But what if we would like to match words that might contain bar, but just not the specific word bar?
(?!\bbar\b)\b\[A-Za-z-]*bar[a-z-]*\b
(?!\bbar\b) Assert that the next input is not bar on a word boundary.
\b\[A-Za-z-]*bar[a-z-]*\b Matches any word on a word boundary that contains bar.
See Regex Demo
Extracted from this comment by bkDJ:
^(?!bar$).*
The nice property of this solution is that it's possible to clearly negate (exclude) multiple words:
^(?!bar$|foo$|banana$).*
I wish to complement the accepted answer and contribute to the discussion with my late answer.
#ChrisVanOpstal shared this regex tutorial which is a great resource for learning regex.
However, it was really time consuming to read through.
I made a cheatsheet for mnemonic convenience.
This reference is based on the braces [], (), and {} leading each class, and I find it easy to recall.
Regex = {
'single_character': ['[]', '.', {'negate':'^'}],
'capturing_group' : ['()', '|', '\\', 'backreferences and named group'],
'repetition' : ['{}', '*', '+', '?', 'greedy v.s. lazy'],
'anchor' : ['^', '\b', '$'],
'non_printable' : ['\n', '\t', '\r', '\f', '\v'],
'shorthand' : ['\d', '\w', '\s'],
}
Just thought of something else that could be done. It's very different from my first answer, as it doesn't use regular expressions, so I decided to make a second answer post.
Use your language of choice's split() method equivalent on the string with the word to negate as the argument for what to split on. An example using Python:
>>> text = 'barbarasdbarbar 1234egb ar bar32 sdfbaraadf'
>>> text.split('bar')
['', '', 'asd', '', ' 1234egb ar ', '32 sdf', 'aadf']
The nice thing about doing it this way, in Python at least (I don't remember if the functionality would be the same in, say, Visual Basic or Java), is that it lets you know indirectly when "bar" was repeated in the string due to the fact that the empty strings between "bar"s are included in the list of results (though the empty string at the beginning is due to there being a "bar" at the beginning of the string). If you don't want that, you can simply remove the empty strings from the list.
I had a list of file names, and I wanted to exclude certain ones, with this sort of behavior (Ruby):
files = [
'mydir/states.rb', # don't match these
'countries.rb',
'mydir/states_bkp.rb', # match these
'mydir/city_states.rb'
]
excluded = ['states', 'countries']
# set my_rgx here
result = WankyAPI.filter(files, my_rgx) # I didn't write WankyAPI...
assert result == ['mydir/city_states.rb', 'mydir/states_bkp.rb']
Here's my solution:
excluded_rgx = excluded.map{|e| e+'\.'}.join('|')
my_rgx = /(^|\/)((?!#{excluded_rgx})[^\.\/]*)\.rb$/
My assumptions for this application:
The string to be excluded is at the beginning of the input, or immediately following a slash.
The permitted strings end with .rb.
Permitted filenames don't have a . character before the .rb.