How would I write a regular expression that matches any URL containing the segment "articles" followed by any other segment, but does NOT match URLs with the segment "articles-main"?
So it would match these:
www.mysite.com/articles
www.mysite.com/articles/tinman
But not these:
www.mysite.com/articles-main
www.mysite.com/articles-main/tinman
This is for use in ExpressionEngine if it matters.
Use a so called negative lookahead:
articles(?!-main)
or more precisely:
mysite.com/articles(?!-main)
to run counter to #Regexident's advice, i'd recommend a positive lookahead articles(?=$|\/).
This is saying to match articles and see if it is followed by a / character or the end of the string. That way it won't matter whether you're matching against, "articles-main" or "articlessomethingelse".
What this won't do is check if articles is its own directory. A value of http://example.com/some-articles will match, which might not be acceptable.
If you don't care about whether the / characters are included in the match, you could use a regular expression along the lines of:
\/articles(?=\/|$)
If you do care and you're using PHP's pcre functions, you could use a positive lookbehind ((?<=)):
(?<=\/)articles(?=\/|$)
More information about these regex assertions can be found on the php.net website.
Look for "articles/". With your examples regex might be a little overkill.
Related
Within Splunk I have a number of field extractions for extracting values from uri stems. I have a few which match a specific pattern, I now want another regex which matches anything but these.
^/SiteName/[^/]*/(?<a_request_type>((?!Process)|(?!process)|(?!Assets)|(?!assets))[^/]+)
The regex above is what I have so far. I am expecting the negative lookaheads to prevent it from matching Process, process, assets or Assets. However it seems that the [^/]+ after these lookaheads can then go ahead and match these strings anyway. Resulting in this regex sometimes overriding the other regexes I wrote to accept these strings
What is the correct syntax for me to make the regex match any string, other than those specified in the negative lookaheads?
Thanks!
Negative lookaheads do not consume any of the string being searched. When you want multiple negative lookaheads, there is no need to separate them with | (OR). Try this:
^/SiteName/[^/]*/(?<a_request_type>((?![Pp]rocess)(?![Aa]ssets))[^/]+)
Note that I have combined your lookaheads ([Pp]rocess and [Aa]ssets) to make the regular expression more concise.
Live test.
I'm trying to detect occurrences of words italicized with *asterisks* around it. However I want to ensure it's not within a link. So it should find "text" in here is some *text* but not within http://google.com/hereissome*text*intheurl.
My first instinct was to use look aheads, but it doesn't seem to work if I use a URL regex such as John Gruber's:
(?i)\b((?:[a-z][\w-]+:(?:/{1,3}|[a-z0-9%])|www\d{0,3}[.]|[a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,4}/)(?:[^\s()<>]+|\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\))+(?:\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\)|[^\s`!()\[\]{};:'".,<>?«»“”‘’]))
And put it in a look ahead at the beginning of the pattern, followed by the rest of the pattern.
(?=URLPATTERN)\*[a-zA-Z\s]\*
So how would I do this?
You can use this alternation technique to match everything first on LHS that you want to discard. Then on RHS use captured group to match desired text.
https?:\/\/\S*|(\*\S+\*)
You can then use captured group #1 for your emphasized text.
RegEx Demo
The following regexp:
^(?!http://google.com/hereissome.*text.*intheurl).*
Matches everything but http://google.com/hereissome*text*intheurl. This is called negative lookahead. Some regexp libraries may not support it, python's does.
Here is a link to Mastering Lookahead and Lookbehind.
I am trying to form a regular expression that will match strings that do NOT end a with a DOT FOLLOWED BY NUMBER.
eg.
abcd1
abcdf12
abcdf124
abcd1.0
abcd1.134
abcdf12.13
abcdf124.2
abcdf124.21
I want to match first three.
I tried modifying this post but it didn't work for me as the number may have variable length.
Can someone help?
You can use something like this:
^((?!\.[\d]+)[\w.])+$
It anchors at the start and end of a line. It basically says:
Anchor at the start of the line
DO NOT match the pattern .NUMBERS
Take every letter, digit, etc, unless we hit the pattern above
Anchor at the end of the line
So, this pattern matches this (no dot then number):
This.Is.Your.Pattern or This.Is.Your.Pattern2012
However it won't match this (dot before the number):
This.Is.Your.Pattern.2012
EDIT: In response to Wiseguy's comment, you can use this:
^((?!\.[\d]+$)[\w.])+$ - which provides an anchor after the number. Therefore, it must be a dot, then only a number at the end... not that you specified that in your question..
If you can relax your restrictions a bit, you may try using this (extended) regular expression:
^[^.]*.?[^0-9]*$
You may omit anchoring metasymbols ^ and $ if you're using function/tool that matches against whole string.
Explanation: This regex allows any symbols except dot until (optional) dot is found, after which all non-numerical symbols are allowed. It won't work for numbers in improper format, like in string: abcd1...3 or abcd1.fdfd2. It also won't work correctly for some string with multiple dots, like abcd.ab123cd.a (the problem description is a bit ambigous).
Philosophical explanation: When using regular expressions, often you don't need to do exactly what your task seems to be, etc. So even simple regex will do the job. An abstract example: you have a file with lines are either numbers, or some complicated names(without digits), and say, you want to filter out all numbers, then simple filtering by [^0-9] - grep '^[0-9]' will do the job.
But if your task is more complex and requires validation of format and doing other fancy stuff on data, why not use a simple script(say, in awk, python, perl or other language)? Or a short "hand-written" function, if you're implementing stand-alone application. Regexes are cool, but they are often not the right tool to use.
I would just use a simple negative look-behind anchored at the end:
.*(?<!\\.\\d+)$
Let's say I have a regular expression that works correctly to find all of the URLs in a text file:
(http://)([a-zA-Z0-9\/\.])*
If what I want is not the URLs but the inverse - all other text except the URLs - is there an easy modification to make to get this?
You could simply search and replace everything that matches the regular expression with an empty string, e.g. in Perl s/(http:\/\/)([a-zA-Z0-9\/\.])*//g
This would give you everything in the original text, except those substrings that match the regular expression.
If for some reason you need a regex-only solution, try this:
((?<=http://[a-zA-Z0-9\/\.#?/%]+(?=[^a-zA-Z0-9\/\.#?/%]))|\A(?!http://[a-zA-Z0-9\/\.#?/%])).+?((?=http://[a-zA-Z0-9\/\.#?/%])|\Z)
I expanded the set of of URL characters a little ([a-zA-Z0-9\/\.#?/%]) to include a few important ones, but this is by no means meant to be exact or exhaustive.
The regex is a bit of a monster, so I'll try to break it down:
(?<=http://[a-zA-Z0-9\/\.#?/%]+(?=[^a-zA-Z0-9\/\.#?/%])
The first potion matches the end of a URL. http://[a-zA-Z0-9\/\.#?/%]+ matches the URL itself, while (?=[^a-zA-Z0-9\/\.#?/%]) asserts that the URL must be followed by a non-URL character so that we are sure we are at the end. A lookahead is used so that the non-URL character is sought but not captured. The whole thing is wrapped in a lookbehind (?<=...) to look for it as the boundary of the match, again without capturing that portion.
We also want to match a non-URL at the beginning of the file. \A(?!http://[a-zA-Z0-9\/\.#?/%]) matches the beginning of the file (\A), followed by a negative lookahead to make sure there's not a URL lurking at the start of the file. (This URL check is simpler than the first one because we only need the beginning of the URL, not the whole thing.)
Both of those checks are put in parenthesis and OR'd together with the | character. After that, .+? matches the string we are trying to capture.
Then we come to ((?=http://[a-zA-Z0-9\/\.#?/%])|\Z). Here, we check for the beginning of a URL, once again with (?=http://[a-zA-Z0-9\/\.#?/%]). The end of the file is also a pretty good sign that we've reached the end of our match, so we should look for that, too, using \Z. Similarly to a first big group, we wrap it in parenthesis and OR the two possibilities together.
The | symbol requires the parenthesis because its precedence is very low, so you have to explicitly state the boundaries of the OR.
This regex relies heavily on zero-width assertions (the \A and \Z anchors, and the lookaround groups). You should always understand a regex before you use it for anything serious or permanent (otherwise you might catch a case of perl), so you might want to check out Start of String and End of String Anchors and Lookahead and Lookbehind Zero-Width Assertions.
Corrections welcome, of course!
If I understand the question correctly, you can use search/replace...just wildcard around your expression and then substitute the first and last parts.
s/^(.*)(your regex here)(.*)$/$1$3/
im not sure if this will work exactly as you intend but it might help:
Whatever you place in the brackets [] will be matched against. If you put ^ within the bracket, i.e [^a-zA-Z0-9/.] it will match everything except what is in the brackets.
http://www.regular-expressions.info/
I want an expression that will fail when it encounters words such as "boon.ini" and "http". The goal would be to take this expression and be able to construct for any set of keywords.
^(?:(?!boon\.ini|http).)*$\r?\n?
(taken from RegexBuddy's library) will match any line that does not contain boon.ini and/or http. Is that what you wanted?
An alternative expression that could be used:
^(?!.*IgnoreMe).*$
^ = indicates start of line
$ = indicates the end of the line
(?! Expression) = indicates zero width look ahead negative match on the expression
The ^ at the front is needed, otherwise when evaluated the negative look ahead could start from somewhere within/beyond the 'IgnoreMe' text - and make a match where you don't want it too.
e.g. If you use the regex:
(?!.*IgnoreMe).*$
With the input "Hello IgnoreMe Please", this will will result in something like: "gnoreMe Please" as the negative look ahead finds that there is no complete string 'IgnoreMe' after the 'I'.
Rather than negating the result within the expression, you should do it in your code. That way, the expression becomes pretty simple.
\b(boon\.ini|http)\b
Would return true if boon.ini or http was anywhere in your string. It won't match words like httpd or httpxyzzy because of the \b, or word boundaries. If you want, you could just remove them and it will match those too. To add more keywords, just add more pipes.
\b(boon\.ini|http|foo|bar)\b
you might be well served by writing a regex that will succeed when it encounters the words you're looking for, and then invert the condition.
For instance, in perl you'd use:
if (!/boon\.ini|http/) {
# the string passed!
}
^[^£]*$
The above expression will restrict only the pound symbol from the string. This will allow all characters except string.
Which language/regexp library? I thought you question was around ASP.NET in which case you can see the "negative lookhead" section of this article:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972966.aspx
Strictly speaking negation of a regular expression, still defines a regular language but there are very few libraries/languages/tool that allow to express it.
Negative lookahed may serve you the same but the actual syntax depends on what you are using. Tim's answer is an example with (?...)
I used this (based on Tim Pietzcker answer) to exclude non-production subdomain URLs for Google Analytics profile filters:
^\w+-*\w*\.(?!(?:alpha(123)*\.|beta(123)*\.|preprod\.)domain\.com).*$
You can see the context here: Regex to Exclude Multiple Words