I'm having to replace fqdn's inside a SQL dump for website migration purposes. I've written a perl filter that's supposed to take STDIN, replace the serialized strings containing the domain name that's supposed to be replaced, replace it with whatever argument is passed into the script, and output to STDOUT.
This is what I have so far:
my $search = $ARGV[0];
my $replace = $ARGV[1];
my $offset_s = length($search);
my $offset_r = length($replace);
my $regex = eval { "s\:([0-9]+)\:\\\"(https?\://.*)($search.*)\\\"" };
while (<STDIN>) {
my #fs = split(';', $_);
foreach (#fs) {
chomp;
if (m#$regex#g) {
my ( $len, $extra, $str ) = ( $1, $2, $3 );
my $new_len = $len - $offset_s + $offset_r;
$str =~ eval { s/$search/$replace/ };
print 's:' . $new_len . ':' . $extra . $str . '\"'."\n";
}
}
}
The filter gets passed data that may look like this (this is taken from a wordpress dump, but we're also supposed to accommodate drupal dumps:
INSERT INTO `wp_2_options` VALUES (1,'siteurl','http://to.be.replaced.com/wordpress/','yes'),(125,'dashboard_widget_options','
a:2:{
s:25:\"dashboard_recent_comments\";a:1:{
s:5:\"items\";i:5;
}
s:24:\"dashboard_incoming_links\";a:2:{
s:4:\"home\";s:31:\"http://to.be.replaced.com/wordpress\";
s:4:\"link\";s:107:\"http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?scoring=d&partner=wordpress&q=link:http://to.be.replaced.com/wordpress/\";
}
}
','yes'),(148,'theme_175','
a:1:{
s:13:\"courses_image\";s:37:\"http://to.be.replaced.com/files/image.png\";
}
','yes')
The regex works if I don't have any periods in my $search. I've tried escaping the periods, i.e. domain\.to\.be\.replaced, but that didn't work. I'm probably doing this either in a very roundabout way or missing something obvious. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
There is no need to evaluate (eval) your regular expression because of including variables in them. Also, to avoid the special meaning of metacharacters of those variables like $search, escape them using quotemeta() function or including the variable between \Q and \E inside the regexp. So instead of:
my $regex = eval { "s\:([0-9]+)\:\\\"(https?\://.*)($search.*)\\\"" };
Use:
my $regex = qr{s\:([0-9]+)\:\\\"(https?\://.*)(\Q$search\E.*)\\\"};
or
my $quoted_search = quotemeta $search;
my $regex = qr{s\:([0-9]+)\:\\\"(https?\://.*)($quoted_search.*)\\\"};
And the same advice for this line:
$str =~ eval { s/$search/$replace/ };
you have to double the escape char \ in your $search variable for the interpolated string to contain the escaped periods.
i.e. domain\.to\.be\.replaced -> domain.to.be.replaced (not wanted)
while domain\\.to\\.be\\.replaced -> domain\.to\.be\.replaced (correct).
I'm not sure your perl regex would replace the DNS in string matching several times the old DNS (in the same serialized string).
I made a gist with a script using bash, sed and one big perl regex for this same problem. You may give it a try.
The regex I use is something like that (exploded for lisibility, and having -7 as the known difference between domain names lengths):
perl -n -p -i -e '1 while s#
([;|{]s:)
([0-9]+)
:\\"
(((?!\\";).)*?)
(domain\.to\.be\.replaced)
(.*?)
\\";#"$1".($2-7).":\\\"$3new.domain.tld$6\\\";"#ge;' file
Which is maybe not the best one but at least it seems to de the job. The g option manages lines containing several serialized strings to cleanup and the while loop redo the whole job until no replacement occurs in serilized strings (for strings containing several occurences of the DNS). I'm not fan enough of regex to try a recursive one.
Related
I recently started learning Perl to automate some mindless data tasks. I work on windows machines, but prefer to use Cygwin. Wrote a Perl script that did everything I wanted fine in Cygwin, but when I tried to run it with Strawberry Perl on Windows via CMD I got the "Unescaped left brace in regex is illegal here in regex," error.
After some reading, I am guessing my Cygwin has an earlier version of Perl and modern versions of Perl which Strawberry is using don't allow for this. I am familiar with escaping characters in regex, but I am getting this error when using a capture group from a previous regex match to do a substitution.
open(my $fh, '<:encoding(UTF-8)', $file)
or die "Could not open file '$file' $!";
my $fileContents = do { local $/; <$fh> };
my $i = 0;
while ($fileContents =~ /(.*Part[^\}]*\})/) {
$defParts[$i] = $1;
$i = $i + 1;
$fileContents =~ s/$1//;
}
Basically I am searching through a file for matches that look like:
Part
{
Somedata
}
Then storing those matches in an array. Then purging the match from the $fileContents so I avoid repeats.
I am certain there are better and more efficient ways of doing any number of these things, but I am surprised that when using a capture group it's complaining about unescaped characters.
I can imagine storing the capture group, manually escaping the braces, then using that for the substitution, but is there a quicker or more efficient way to avoid this error without rewriting the whole block? (I'd like to avoid special packages if possible so that this script is easily portable.)
All of the answers I found related to this error were with specific cases where it was more straightforward or practical to edit the source with the curly braces.
Thank you!
I would just bypass the whole problem and at the same time simplify the code:
my $i = 0;
while ($fileContents =~ s/(.*Part[^\}]*\})//) {
$defParts[$i] = $1;
$i = $i + 1;
}
Here we simply do the substitution first. If it succeeds, it will still set $1 and return true (just like plain /.../), so there's no need to mess around with s/$1// later.
Using $1 (or any variable) as the pattern would mean you have to escape all regex metacharacters (e.g. *, +, {, (, |, etc.) if you want it to match literally. You can do that pretty easily with quotemeta or inline (s/\Q$1//), but it's still an extra step and thus error prone.
Alternatively, you could keep your original code and not use s///. I mean, you already found the match. Why use s/// to search for it again?
while ($fileContents =~ /(.*Part[^\}]*\})/) {
...
substr($fileContents, $-[0], $+[0] - $-[0], "");
}
We already know where the match is in the string. $-[0] is the position of the start and $+[0] the position of the end of the last regex match (thus $+[0] - $-[0] is the length of the matched string). We can then use substr to replace that chunk by "".
But let's keep going with s///:
my $i = 0;
while ($fileContents =~ s/(.*Part[^\}]*\})//) {
$defParts[$i] = $1;
$i++;
}
$i = $i + 1; can be reduced to $i++; ("increment $i").
my #defParts;
while ($fileContents =~ s/(.*Part[^\}]*\})//) {
push #defParts, $1;
}
The only reason we need $i is to add elements to the #defParts array. We can do that by using push, so there's no need for maintaining an extra variable. This saves us another line.
Now we probably don't need to destroy $fileContents. If the substitution exists only for the benefit of this loop (so I doesn't re-match already extracted content), we can do better:
my #defParts;
while ($fileContents =~ /(.*Part[^\}]*\})/g) {
push #defParts, $1;
}
Using /g in scalar context attaches a "current position" to $fileContents, so the next match attempt starts where the previous match left off. This is probably more efficient because it doesn't have to keep rewriting $fileContents.
my #defParts = $fileContents =~ /(.*Part[^\}]*\})/g;
... Or we could just use //g in list context, where it returns a list of all captured groups of all matches, and assign that to #defParts.
my #defParts = $fileContents =~ /.*Part[^\}]*\}/g;
If there are no capture groups in the regex, //g in list context returns the list of all matched strings (as if there had been ( ) around the whole regex).
Feel free to choose any of these. :-)
As for the question of escaping, that's what quotemeta is for,
my $needs_escaping = q(some { data } here);
say quotemeta $needs_escaping;
what prints (on v5.16)
some\ \{\ data\ \}\ here
and works on $1 as well. See linked docs for details. Also see \Q in perlre (search for \Q), which is how this is used inside a regex, say s/\Q$1//;. The \E stops escaping (what you don't need).
Some comments.
Relying on deletion so that the regex keeps finding further such patterns may be a risky design. If it isn't and you do use it there is no need for indices, since we have push
my #defParts;
while ($fileContents =~ /($pattern)/) {
push #defParts, $1;
$fileContents =~ s/\Q$1//;
}
where \Q is added in the regex. Better yet, as explained in melpomene's answer the substitution can be done in the while condition itself
push #defParts, $1 while $fileContents =~ s/($pattern)//;
where I used the statement modifier form (postfix syntax) for conciseness.
With the /g modifier in scalar context, as in while (/($pattern)/g) { .. }, the search continues from the position of the previous match in each iteration, and this is a usual way to iterate over all instances of a pattern in a string. Please read up on use of /g in scalar context as there are details in its behavior that one should be aware of.
However, this is tricky here (even as it works) as the string changes underneath the regex. If efficiency is not a concern, you can capture all matches with /g in list context and then remove them
my #all_matches = $fileContents =~ /$patt/g;
$fileContents =~ s/$patt//g;
While inefficient, as it makes two passes, this is much simpler and clearer.
I expect that Somedata cannot possibly, ever, contain }, for instance as nested { ... }, correct? If it does you have a problem of balanced delimiters, which is far more rounded. One approach is to use the core Text::Balanced module. Search for SO posts with examples.
How do you create a $scalar from the result of a regex match?
Is there any way that once the script has matched the regex that it can be assigned to a variable so it can be used later on, outside of the block.
IE. If $regex_result = blah blah then do something.
I understand that I should make the regex as non-greedy as possible.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
# use diagnostics;
use Win32::OLE;
use Win32::OLE::Const 'Microsoft Outlook';
my #Qmail;
my $regex = "^\\s\*owner \#";
my $sentence = $regex =~ "/^\\s\*owner \#/";
my $outlook = Win32::OLE->new('Outlook.Application')
or warn "Failed Opening Outlook.";
my $namespace = $outlook->GetNamespace("MAPI");
my $folder = $namespace->Folders("test")->Folders("Inbox");
my $items = $folder->Items;
foreach my $msg ( $items->in ) {
if ( $msg->{Subject} =~ m/^(.*test alert) / ) {
my $name = $1;
print " processing Email for $name \n";
push #Qmail, $msg->{Body};
}
}
for(#Qmail) {
next unless /$regex|^\s*description/i;
print; # prints what i want ie lines that start with owner and description
}
print $sentence; # prints ^\\s\*offense \ # not lines that start with owner.
One way is to verify a match occurred.
use strict;
use warnings;
my $str = "hello what world";
my $match = 'no match found';
my $what = 'no what found';
if ( $str =~ /hello (what) world/ )
{
$match = $&;
$what = $1;
}
print '$match = ', $match, "\n";
print '$what = ', $what, "\n";
Use Below Perl variables to meet your requirements -
$` = The string preceding whatever was matched by the last pattern match, not counting patterns matched in nested blocks that have been exited already.
$& = Contains the string matched by the last pattern match
$' = The string following whatever was matched by the last pattern match, not counting patterns matched in nested blockes that have been exited already. For example:
$_ = 'abcdefghi';
/def/;
print "$`:$&:$'\n"; # prints abc:def:ghi
The match of a regex is stored in special variables (as well as some more readable variables if you specify the regex to do so and use the /p flag).
For the whole last match you're looking at the $MATCH (or $& for short) variable. This is covered in the manual page perlvar.
So say you wanted to store your last for loop's matches in an array called #matches, you could write the loop (and for some reason I think you meant it to be a foreach loop) as:
my #matches = ();
foreach (#Qmail) {
next unless /$regex|^\s*description/i;
push #matches_in_qmail $MATCH
print;
}
I think you have a problem in your code. I'm not sure of the original intention but looking at these lines:
my $regex = "^\\s\*owner \#";
my $sentence = $regex =~ "/^\s*owner #/";
I'll step through that as:
Assign $regexto the string ^\s*owner #.
Assign $sentence to value of running a match within $regex with the regular expression /^s*owner $/ (which won't match, if it did $sentence will be 1 but since it didn't it's false).
I think. I'm actually not exactly certain what that line will do or was meant to do.
I'm not quite sure what part of the match you want: the captures, or something else. I've written Regexp::Result which you can use to grab all the captures etc. on a successful match, and Regexp::Flow to grab multiple results (including success statuses). If you just want numbered captures, you can also use Data::Munge
You can do the following:
my $str ="hello world";
my ($hello, $world) = $str =~ /(hello)|(what)/;
say "[$_]" for($hello,$world);
As you see $hello contains "hello".
If you have older perl on your system like me, perl 5.18 or earlier, and you use $ $& $' like codequestor's answer above, it will slow down your program.
Instead, you can use your regex pattern with the modifier /p, and then check these 3 variables: ${^PREMATCH}, ${^MATCH}, and ${^POSTMATCH} for your matching results.
I am working with text, and wish to replace a # character with an incrementally increasing number. The text looks like this:
Chap.2.#
Chap.2.#
Chap.2.#
Chap.2.#
And I am trying to get it to read:
Chap.2.1
Chap.2.2
Chap.2.3
Chap.2.4 and on up to triple digits.
My source document is Mellel, but I also have Nisus Writer Pro, and a host of other text editors such as TextMate, Atom, TextWrangler, Brackets, CotEditor, jEdit, etc. I have tried using Regular Expressions in apps that indicate availability of using that, but to no avail.
I have tried searching for #
then replacing with \i, or \1, or \1\i, or \1\i.
Can someone help please? I've read many other similar questions on SO, and other sites, bt I can not seem to get the syntax correct (plus the other examples are not close enough to mine to help me figure this out).Thanks.
One solution is to use perl:
perl -pe 'BEGIN { our $i = 1; } s/Chap\.2\.#/"Chap.2.".($i++)/ge;' <chapters.txt;
Extension to handle multiple top-level numbers, incrementing the second-level number from 1 for each top-level number independently:
perl -pe 'BEGIN { our $h = {}; } s/Chap\.(\d+)\.#/"Chap.$1.".(exists($h->{$1}) ? $h->{$1}++ : ($h->{$1} = 1)++)/ge;' <chapters.txt;
To only find and incrementally replace the # character you can do:
perl -pe 'BEGIN { our $i = 1; } s/#/$i++/ge;' <chapters.txt;
Here's a way to do this with PHP at the commandline with a file called convert.php which takes a filename as an argument. Note: no for-loop:
<?php
if ( count($argv) < 2 ) {
echo "Correct syntax is: convert.php filename.ext\n";
exit;
}
$file = $argv[1];
$contents = file_get_contents( $file );
$nu = preg_replace_callback('/\#/',function($matches){
static $i=1;
return $i++;
},$contents);
echo '<pre>',"\n";
echo $nu;
file_put_contents("bestNumberedChapters.txt",$nu);
So, it is feasible with PHP to replace all chapter headings containing a '#' with an incremental, numerical value.
I'm trying to replace 600 different strings in a very large text file 30Mb+. I'm current building a script that does this; following this Question:
Script:
$string = gc $filePath
$string | % {
$_ -replace 'something0','somethingelse0' `
-replace 'something1','somethingelse1' `
-replace 'something2','somethingelse2' `
-replace 'something3','somethingelse3' `
-replace 'something4','somethingelse4' `
-replace 'something5','somethingelse5' `
...
(600 More Lines...)
...
}
$string | ac "C:\log.txt"
But as this will check each line 600 times and there are well over 150,000+ lines in the text file this means there’s a lot of processing time.
Is there a better alternative to doing this that is more efficient?
Combining the hash technique from Adi Inbar's answer, and the match evaluator from Keith Hill's answer to another recent question, here is how you can perform the replace in PowerShell:
# Build hashtable of search and replace values.
$replacements = #{
'something0' = 'somethingelse0'
'something1' = 'somethingelse1'
'something2' = 'somethingelse2'
'something3' = 'somethingelse3'
'something4' = 'somethingelse4'
'something5' = 'somethingelse5'
'X:\Group_14\DACU' = '\\DACU$'
'.*[^xyz]' = 'oO{xyz}'
'moresomethings' = 'moresomethingelses'
}
# Join all (escaped) keys from the hashtable into one regular expression.
[regex]$r = #($replacements.Keys | foreach { [regex]::Escape( $_ ) }) -join '|'
[scriptblock]$matchEval = { param( [Text.RegularExpressions.Match]$matchInfo )
# Return replacement value for each matched value.
$matchedValue = $matchInfo.Groups[0].Value
$replacements[$matchedValue]
}
# Perform replace over every line in the file and append to log.
Get-Content $filePath |
foreach { $r.Replace( $_, $matchEval ) } |
Add-Content 'C:\log.txt'
So, what you're saying is that you want to replace any of 600 strings in each of 150,000 lines, and you want to run one replace operation per line?
Yes, there is a way to do it, but not in PowerShell, at least I can't think of one. It can be done in Perl.
The Method:
Construct a hash where the keys are the somethings and the values are the somethingelses.
Join the keys of the hash with the | symbol, and use it as a match group in the regex.
In the replacement, interpolate an expression that retrieves a value from the hash using the match variable for the capture group
The Problem:
Frustratingly, PowerShell doesn't expose the match variables outside the regex replace call. It doesn't work with the -replace operator and it doesn't work with [regex]::replace.
In Perl, you can do this, for example:
$string =~ s/(1|2|3)/#{[$1 + 5]}/g;
This will add 5 to the digits 1, 2, and 3 throughout the string, so if the string is "1224526123 [2] [6]", it turns into "6774576678 [7] [6]".
However, in PowerShell, both of these fail:
$string -replace '(1|2|3)',"$($1 + 5)"
[regex]::replace($string,'(1|2|3)',"$($1 + 5)")
In both cases, $1 evaluates to null, and the expression evaluates to plain old 5. The match variables in replacements are only meaningful in the resulting string, i.e. a single-quoted string or whatever the double-quoted string evaluates to. They're basically just backreferences that look like match variables. Sure, you can quote the $ before the number in a double-quoted string, so it will evaluate to the corresponding match group, but that defeats the purpose - it can't participate in an expression.
The Solution:
[This answer has been modified from the original. It has been formatted to fit match strings with regex metacharacters. And your TV screen, of course.]
If using another language is acceptable to you, the following Perl script works like a charm:
$filePath = $ARGV[0]; # Or hard-code it or whatever
open INPUT, "< $filePath";
open OUTPUT, '> C:\log.txt';
%replacements = (
'something0' => 'somethingelse0',
'something1' => 'somethingelse1',
'something2' => 'somethingelse2',
'something3' => 'somethingelse3',
'something4' => 'somethingelse4',
'something5' => 'somethingelse5',
'X:\Group_14\DACU' => '\\DACU$',
'.*[^xyz]' => 'oO{xyz}',
'moresomethings' => 'moresomethingelses'
);
foreach (keys %replacements) {
push #strings, qr/\Q$_\E/;
$replacements{$_} =~ s/\\/\\\\/g;
}
$pattern = join '|', #strings;
while (<INPUT>) {
s/($pattern)/$replacements{$1}/g;
print OUTPUT;
}
close INPUT;
close OUTPUT;
It searches for the keys of the hash (left of the =>), and replaces them with the corresponding values. Here's what's happening:
The foreach loop goes through all the elements of the hash and create an array called #strings that contains the keys of the %replacements hash, with metacharacters quoted using \Q and \E, and the result of that quoted for use as a regex pattern (qr = quote regex). In the same pass, it escapes all the backslashes in the replacement strings by doubling them.
Next, the elements of the array are joined with |'s to form the search pattern. You could include the grouping parentheses in $pattern if you want, but I think this way makes it clearer what's happening.
The while loop reads each line from the input file, replaces any of the strings in the search pattern with the corresponding replacement strings in the hash, and writes the line to the output file.
BTW, you might have noticed several other modifications from the original script. My Perl has collected some dust during my recent PowerShell kick, and on a second look I noticed several things that could be done better.
while (<INPUT>) reads the file one line at a time. A lot more sensible than reading the entire 150,000 lines into an array, especially when your goal is efficiency.
I simplified #{[$replacements{$1}]} to $replacements{$1}. Perl doesn't have a built-in way of interpolating expressions like PowerShell's $(), so #{[ ]} is used as a workaround - it creates a literal array of one element containing the expression. But I realized that it's not necessary if the expression is just a single scalar variable (I had it in there as a holdover from my initial testing, where I was applying calculations to the $1 match variable).
The close statements aren't strictly necessary, but it's considered good practice to explicitly close your filehandles.
I changed the for abbreviation to foreach, to make it clearer and more familiar to PowerShell programmers.
I also have no idea how to solve this in powershell, but I do know how to solve it in Bash and that is by using a tool called sed. Luckily, there is also Sed for Windows. If all you want to do is replace "something#" with "somethingelse#" everywhere then this command will do the trick for you
sed -i "s/something([0-9]+)/somethingelse\1/g" c:\log.txt
In Bash you'd actually need to escape a couple of those characters with backslashes, but I'm not sure you need to in windows. If the first command complains you can try
sed -i "s/something\([0-9]\+\)/somethingelse\1/g" c:\log.txt
I would use the powershell switch statement:
$string = gc $filePath
$string | % {
switch -regex ($_) {
'something0' { 'somethingelse0' }
'something1' { 'somethingelse1' }
'something2' { 'somethingelse2' }
'something3' { 'somethingelse3' }
'something4' { 'somethingelse4' }
'something5' { 'somethingelse5' }
'pattern(?<a>\d+)' { $matches['a'] } # sample of more complex logic
...
(600 More Lines...)
...
default { $_ }
}
} | ac "C:\log.txt"
I've got some data that I'm parsing in Perl, and will be adding more and more differently formatted data in the near future. What I would like to do is write an easy-to-use function, that I could pass a string and a regex to, and it would return anything in parentheses. It would work something like this (pseudocode):
sub parse {
$data = shift;
$regex = shift;
$data =~ eval ("m/$regex/")
foreach $x ($1...$n)
{
push (#ra, $x);
}
return \#ra;
}
Then, I could call it like this:
#subs = parse ($data, '^"([0-9]+)",([^:]*):(\W+):([A-Z]{3}[0-9]{5}),ID=([0-9]+)');
As you can see, there's a couple of issues with this code. I don't know if the eval would work, the 'foreach' definitely wouldn't work, and without knowing how many parentheses there are, I don't know how many times to loop.
This is too complicated for split, so if there's another function or possibility that I'm overlooking, let me know.
Thanks for your help!
In list context, a regular expression will return a list of all the parenthesized matches.
So all you have to do is:
my #matches = $string =~ /regex (with) (parens)/;
And assuming that it matched, #matches will be an array of the two capturing groups.
So using your regex:
my #subs = $data =~ /^"([0-9]+)",([^:]*):(\W+):([A-Z]{3}[0-9]{5}),ID=([0-9]+)/;
Also, when you have long regexes, Perl has the x modifier, which goes after the closing regex delimiter. The x modifier allows you to put white-space and newlines inside the regex for increased readability.
If you are worried about the capturing groups that might be zero length, you can pass the matches through #subs = grep {length} #subs to filter them out.
Then, I could call it like this:
#subs = parse($data,
'^"([0-9]+)",([^:]*):(\W+):([A-Z]{3}[0-9]{5}),ID=([0-9]+)');
Instead, call it like:
parse($data,
qr/^"([0-9]+)",([^:]*):(\W+):([A-Z]{3}[0-9]{5}),ID=([0-9]+)/);
Further, your task would be made simpler if you can use named captures (i.e. Perl 5.10 and later). Here is an example:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict; use warnings;
my %re = (
id => '(?<id> [0-9]+ )',
name => '(?<name> \w+ )',
value => '(?<value> [0-9]+ )',
);
my #this = (
'123,one:12',
'456,two:21',
);
my #that = (
'one:[12],123',
'two:[21],456',
);
my $this_re = qr/$re{id} , $re{name} : $re{value}/x;
my $that_re = qr/$re{name} : \[$re{value}\] , $re{id} /x;
use YAML;
for my $d ( #this ) {
print Dump [ parse($d, $this_re) ];
}
for my $d ( #that ) {
print Dump [ parse($d, $that_re) ];
}
sub parse {
my ($d, $re) = #_;
return unless $d =~ $re;
return my #result = #+{qw(id name value)};
}
Output:
---
- 123
- one
- 12
---
- 456
- two
- 21
---
- 123
- one
- 12
---
- 456
- two
- 21
You are trying to parse a complex expression with a regex - which is an insufficient tool for the job. Recall that regular expressions cannot parse higher grammars. For intuition, any expression which might be nested cannot be parsed with regex.
When you want to find text inside of pairs of parenthesis, you want to use Text::Balanced.
But, that is not what you want to do, so it will not help you.