I am using the following perl regex lines
$myalbum =~ s/[-_'&’]/ /g;
$myalbum =~ s/[,’.]//g;
$myalbum =~ m/([A-Z0-9\$]+) +([A-Z0-9\$]+) +([A-Z0-9\$]+) +([A-Z0-9\$]+) +([A-Z0-9\$]+)/i;
to match the following strings
"30_Seconds_To_Mars_-_30_Seconds_To_Mars"
"30_Seconds_To_Mars_-_A_Beautiful_Lie"
"311_-_311"
"311_-_From_Chaos"
"311_-_Grassroots"
"311_-_Sound_System"
What I am experiencing is that for strings with less than 5 matching groups (ex. 311_-_311), attempting to print $1 $2 $3 prints nothing at all. Only strings with more than 5 matches will print.
How do I resolve this?
It looks like you just want the words in separate groups. To me, it seems like you're abusing regexes to do that when you could just run your substitutions and then split. Just do:
$myalbum =~ s/[-_'&’]/ /g;
$myalbum =~ s/[,’.]//g;
my #myalbum_list = split(/\s/, $myalbum);
#Print out whatever it is you want/ test length, etc...
print "$myalbum_list[0] $myalbum_list[1] $myalbum_list[2]";
the + character means at least one match. Which means your regex m/([A-Z0-9\$]+) +([A-Z0-9\$]+) + ... requires all those fields to be there for it to be considered a match. The reason you are not capturing anything is because it's not actually matching.
You are probably looking for the * character which means zero or more not one or more like +.
I suppose your capturing groups are empty for "311 - 311" because this string doesn't match your regex.
How to resolve? Use * instead of + to permit empty sequences.
Edit: From your post I guess you want to extract the album name, i.e. the part before the minus sign.
Why not match against '(.*) - (.*)', being the first group the album and the second the title. The problem is with strings like "Album with minus - sign - First track" or "My Album - Track is one - two - three". But also as a human you wouldn't know there where the album ends and the track starts.
Related
I'm having difficulty writing a Perl program to extract the word following a certain word.
For example:
Today i'm not going anywhere except to office.
I want the word after anywhere, so the output should be except.
I have tried this
my $words = "Today i'm not going anywhere except to office.";
my $w_after = ( $words =~ /anywhere (\S+)/ );
but it seems this is wrong.
Very close:
my ($w_after) = ($words =~ /anywhere\s+(\S+)/);
^ ^ ^^^
+--------+ |
Note 1 Note 2
Note 1: =~ returns a list of captured items, so the assignment target needs to be a list.
Note 2: allow one or more blanks after anywhere
In Perl v5.22 and later, you can use \b{wb} to get better results for natural language. The pattern could be
/anywhere\b{wb}.+?\b{wb}(.+?\b{wb})/
"wb" stands for word break, and it will account for words that have apostrophes in them, like "I'll", that plain \b doesn't.
.+?\b{wb}
matches the shortest non-empty sequence of characters that don't have a word break in them. The first one matches the span of spaces in your sentence; and the second one matches "except". It is enclosed in parentheses, so upon completion $1 contains "except".
\b{wb} is documented most fully in perlrebackslash
First, you have to write parentheses around left side expression of = operator to force array context for regexp evaluation. See m// and // in perlop documentation.[1] You can write
parentheses also around =~ binding operator to improve readability but it is not necessary because =~ has pretty high priority.
Use POSIX Character Classes word
my ($w_after) = ($words =~ / \b anywhere \W+ (\w+) \b /x);
Note I'm using x so whitespaces in regexp are ignored. Also use \b word boundary to anchor regexp correctly.
[1]: I write my ($w_after) just for convenience because you can write my ($a, $b, $c, #rest) as equivalent of (my $a, my $b, my $c, my #rest) but you can also control scope of your variables like (my $a, our $UGLY_GLOBAL, local $_, #_).
This Regex to be matched:
my ($expect) = ($words=~m/anywhere\s+([^\s]+)\s+/);
^\s+ the word between two spaces
Thanks.
If you want to also take into consideration the punctuation marks, like in:
my $words = "Today i'm not going anywhere; except to office.";
Then try this:
my ($w_after) = ($words =~ /anywhere[[:punct:]|\s]+(\S+)/);
I want to create extract the first two words from a sentence using a Perl function in PostgreSQL. In PostgreSQL, I can do this with:
text = "I am trying to make this work";
Select substring(text from '(^\w+-\w+|^\w+(\s+)?(!|,|\&|'')?(\s+)?\w+)');
It would return "I Am"
I tried to build a Perl function in Postgresql that does the same thing.
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION extract_first_two (text)
RETURNS text AS
$$
my $my_text = $_[0];
my $temp;
$pattern = '^\w+-\w+|^\w+(\s+)?(!|,|\&|'')?(\s+)?\w+)';
my $regex = qr/$pattern/;
if ($my_text=~ $regex) {
$temp = $1;
}
return $temp;
$$ LANGUAGE plperl;
But I receive a syntax error near the regular expression. I am not sure what I am doing wrong.
Extracting words is none trivial even in English. Take the following contrived example using Locale::CLDR
use 'Locale::CLDR';
my $locale = Locale::CLDR->new('en');
my #words = $locale->split_words('adf543. 123.25');
#words now contains
adf543
.
123.25
Note that the full stop after adf543 is split into a separate word but the one between 123 and 25 is kept as part of the number 123.25 even though the '.' is the same character
If gets worse when you look at non English languages and much worse when you use non Latin scripts.
You need to precisely define what you think a word is otherwise the following French gets split incorrectly.
Je avais dit «Elle a dit «Il a dit «Ni» il ya trois secondes»»
The parentheses are mismatched in our regex pattern. It has three opening parentheses and four closing ones.
Also, you have two single quotes in the middle of a singly-quoted string, so
'^\w+-\w+|^\w+(\s+)?(!|,|\&|'')?(\s+)?\w+)'
is parsed as two separate strings
'^\w+-\w+|^\w+(\s+)?(!|,|\&|'')?(\s+)?\w+)'
and
'^\w+-\w+|^\w+(\s+)?(!|,|\&|'
')?(\s+)?\w+)'
But I can't suggest how to fix it as I don't understand your intention.
Did you mean a double quote perhaps? In which case (!|,|\&|")? can be written as [!,&"]?
Update
At a rough guess I think you want this
my $regex = qr{ ^ \w++ \s* [-!,&"]* \s* \w+ }x;
$temp = $1 if $my_text=~ /($regex)/;
but I can't be sure. If you describe what you're looking for in English then I can help you better. For instance, it's unclear why you don't have question marks, full stops, and semicolons in the list of intervening punctuation.
I'm trying to learn something about regular expressions.
Here is what I'm going to match:
/parent/child
/parent/child?
/parent/child?firstparam=abc123
/parent/child?secondparam=def456
/parent/child?firstparam=abc123&secondparam=def456
/parent/child?secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123
/parent/child?thirdparam=ghi789&secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123
/parent/child?secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123&thirdparam=ghi789
/parent/child?thirdparam=ghi789
/parent/child/
/parent/child/?
/parent/child/?firstparam=abc123
/parent/child/?secondparam=def456
/parent/child/?firstparam=abc123&secondparam=def456
/parent/child/?secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123
/parent/child/?thirdparam=ghi789&secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123
/parent/child/?secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123&thirdparam=ghi789
/parent/child/?thirdparam=ghi789
My expression should "grabs" abc123 and def456.
And now just an example about what I'm not going to match ("question mark" is missing):
/parent/child/firstparam=abc123&secondparam=def456
Well, I built the following expression:
^(?:/parent/child){1}(?:^(?:/\?|\?)+(?:firstparam=([^&]*)|secondparam=([^&]*)|[^&]*)?)?
But that doesn't work.
Could you help me to understand what I'm doing wrong?
Thanks in advance.
UPDATE 1
Ok, I made other tests.
I'm trying to fix the previous version with something like this:
/parent/child(?:(?:\?|/\?)+(?:firstparam=([^&]*)|secondparam=([^&]*)|[^&]*)?)?$
Let me explain my idea:
Must start with /parent/child:
/parent/child
Following group is optional
(?: ... )?
The previous optional group must starts with ? or /?
(?:\?|/\?)+
Optional parameters (I grab values if specified parameters are part of querystring)
(?:firstparam=([^&]*)|secondparam=([^&]*)|[^&]*)?
End of line
$
Any advice?
UPDATE 2
My solution must be based just on regular expressions.
Just for example, I previously wrote the following one:
/parent/child(?:[?&/]*(?:firstparam=([^&]*)|secondparam=([^&]*)|[^&]*))*$
And that works pretty nice.
But it matches the following input too:
/parent/child/firstparam=abc123&secondparam=def456
How could I modify the expression in order to not match the previous string?
You didn't specify a language so I'll just usre Perl. So basically instead of matching everything, I just matched exactly what I thought you needed. Correct me if I am wrong please.
while ($subject =~ m/(?<==)\w+?(?=&|\W|$)/g) {
# matched text = $&
}
(?<= # Assert that the regex below can be matched, with the match ending at this position (positive lookbehind)
= # Match the character “=” literally
)
\\w # Match a single character that is a “word character” (letters, digits, and underscores)
+? # Between one and unlimited times, as few times as possible, expanding as needed (lazy)
(?= # Assert that the regex below can be matched, starting at this position (positive lookahead)
# Match either the regular expression below (attempting the next alternative only if this one fails)
& # Match the character “&” literally
| # Or match regular expression number 2 below (attempting the next alternative only if this one fails)
\\W # Match a single character that is a “non-word character”
| # Or match regular expression number 3 below (the entire group fails if this one fails to match)
\$ # Assert position at the end of the string (or before the line break at the end of the string, if any)
)
Output:
This regex will work as long as you know what your parameter names are going to be and you're sure that they won't change.
\/parent\/child\/?\?(?:(?:firstparam|secondparam|thirdparam)\=([\w]+)&?)(?:(?:firstparam|secondparam|thirdparam)\=([\w]+)&?)?(?:(?:firstparam|secondparam|thirdparam)\=([\w]+)&?)?
Whilst regex is not the best solution for this (the above code examples will be far more efficient, as string functions are way faster than regexes) this will work if you need a regex solution with up to 3 parameters. Out of interest, why must the solution use only regex?
In any case, this regex will match the following strings:
/parent/child?firstparam=abc123
/parent/child?secondparam=def456
/parent/child?firstparam=abc123&secondparam=def456
/parent/child?secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123
/parent/child?thirdparam=ghi789&secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123
/parent/child?secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123&thirdparam=ghi789
/parent/child?thirdparam=ghi789
/parent/child/?firstparam=abc123
/parent/child/?secondparam=def456
/parent/child/?firstparam=abc123&secondparam=def456
/parent/child/?secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123
/parent/child/?thirdparam=ghi789&secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123
/parent/child/?secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123&thirdparam=ghi789
/parent/child/?thirdparam=ghi789
It will now only match those containing query string parameters, and put them into capture groups for you.
What language are you using to process your matches?
If you are using preg_match with PHP, you can get the whole match as well as capture groups in an array with
preg_match($regex, $string, $matches);
Then you can access the whole match with $matches[0] and the rest with $matches[1], $matches[2], etc.
If you want to add additional parameters you'll also need to add them in the regex too, and add additional parts to get your data. For example, if you had
/parent/child/?secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123&fourthparam=jkl01112&thirdparam=ghi789
The regex will become
\/parent\/child\/?\?(?:(?:firstparam|secondparam|thirdparam|fourthparam)\=([\w]+)&?)(?:(?:firstparam|secondparam|thirdparam|fourthparam)\=([\w]+)&?)?(?:(?:firstparam|secondparam|thirdparam|fourthparam)\=([\w]+)&?)?(?:(?:firstparam|secondparam|thirdparam|fourthparam)\=([\w]+)&?)?
This will become a bit more tedious to maintain as you add more parameters, though.
You can optionally include ^ $ at the start and end if the multi-line flag is enabled. If you also need to match the whole lines without query strings, wrap this whole regex in a non-capture group (including ^ $) and add
|(?:^\/parent\/child\/?\??$)
to the end.
You're not escaping the /s in your regex for starters and using {1} for a single repetition of something is unnecessary; you only use those when you want more than one repetition or a range of repetitions.
And part of what you're trying to do is simply not a good use of a regex. I'll show you an easier way to deal with that: you want to use something like split and put the information into a hash that you can check the contents of later. Because you didn't specify a language, I'm just going to use Perl for my example, but every language I know with regexes also has easy access to hashes and something like split, so this should be easy enough to port:
# I picked an example to show how this works.
my $route = '/parent/child/?first=123&second=345&third=678';
my %params; # I'm going to put those URL parameters in this hash.
# Perl has a way to let me avoid escaping the /s, but I wanted an example that
# works in other languages too.
if ($route =~ m/\/parent\/child\/\?(.*)/) { # Use the regex for this part
print "Matched route.\n";
# But NOT for this part.
my $query = $1; # $1 is a Perl thing. It contains what (.*) matched above.
my #items = split '&', $query; # Each item is something like param=123
foreach my $item (#items) {
my ($param, $value) = split '=', $item;
$params{$param} = $value; # Put the parameters in a hash for easy access.
print "$param set to $value \n";
}
}
# Now you can check the parameter values and do whatever you need to with them.
# And you can add new parameters whenever you want, etc.
if ($params{'first'} eq '123') {
# Do whatever
}
My solution:
/(?:\w+/)*(?:(?:\w+)?\?(?:\w+=\w+(?:&\w+=\w+)*)?|\w+|)
Explain:
/(?:\w+/)* match /parent/child/ or /parent/
(?:\w+)?\?(?:\w+=\w+(?:&\w+=\w+)*)? match child?firstparam=abc123 or ?firstparam=abc123 or ?
\w+ match text like child
..|) match nothing(empty)
If you need only query string, pattern would reduce such as:
/(?:\w+/)*(?:\w+)?\?(\w+=\w+(?:&\w+=\w+)*)
If you want to get every parameter from query string, this is a Ruby sample:
re = /\/(?:\w+\/)*(?:\w+)?\?(\w+=\w+(?:&\w+=\w+)*)/
s = '/parent/child?secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123&thirdparam=ghi789'
if m = s.match(re)
query_str = m[1] # now, you can 100% trust this string
query_str.scan(/(\w+)=(\w+)/) do |param,value| #grab parameter
printf("%s, %s\n", param, value)
end
end
output
secondparam, def456
firstparam, abc123
thirdparam, ghi789
This script will help you.
First, i check, is there any symbol like ?.
Then, i kill first part of line (left from ?).
Next, i split line by &, where each value splitted by =.
my $r = q"/parent/child
/parent/child?
/parent/child?firstparam=abc123
/parent/child?secondparam=def456
/parent/child?firstparam=abc123&secondparam=def456
/parent/child?secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123
/parent/child?thirdparam=ghi789&secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123
/parent/child?secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123&thirdparam=ghi789
/parent/child?thirdparam=ghi789
/parent/child/
/parent/child/?
/parent/child/?firstparam=abc123
/parent/child/?secondparam=def456
/parent/child/?firstparam=abc123&secondparam=def456
/parent/child/?secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123
/parent/child/?thirdparam=ghi789&secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123
/parent/child/?secondparam=def456&firstparam=abc123&thirdparam=ghi789
/parent/child/?thirdparam=ghi789";
for my $string(split /\n/, $r){
if (index($string,'?')!=-1){
substr($string, 0, index($string,'?')+1,"");
#say "string = ".$string;
if (index($string,'=')!=-1){
my #params = map{$_ = [split /=/, $_];}split/\&/, $string;
$"="\n";
say "$_->[0] === $_->[1]" for (#params);
say "######next########";
}
else{
#print "there is no params!"
}
}
else{
#say "there is no params!";
}
}
I have following text pattern
(2222) First Last (ab-cd/ABC1), <first.last#site.domain.com> 1224: efadsfadsfdsf
(3333) First Last (abcd/ABC12), <first.last#site.domain.com> 1234, 4657: efadsfadsfdsf
I want the number 1224 or 1234, 4657 from the above text after the text >.
I have this
\((\d+)\)\s\w*\s\w*\s\(\w*\/\w+\d*\),\s<\w*\.\w*\#\w*\.domain.com>\s\d+:
which will take the text before : But i want the one after email till :
Is there any easy regular expression to do this? or should I use split and do this
Thanks
Edit: The whole text is returned by a command line tool.
(3333) First Last (abcd/ABC12), <first.last#site.domain.com> 1234, 4657: efadsfadsfdsf
(3333) - Unique ID
First Last - First and last names
<first.last#site.domain.com> - Email address in format FirstName.LastName#sub.domain.com
1234, 4567 - database primary Keys
: xxxx - Headline
What I have to do is process the above and get hte database ID (in ex: 1234, 4567 2 separate ID's) and query the tables
The above is the output (like this I will get many entries) from the tool which I am calling via my Perl script.
My idea was to use a regular expression to get the database id's. Guess I could use regular expression for this
you can fudge the stuff you don't care about to make the expression easier, say just 'glob' the parts between the parentheticals (and the email delimiters) using non-greedy quantifiers:
/(\d+)\).*?\(.*?\),\s*<.*?>\s*(\d+(?:,\s*\d+)*):/ (not tested!)
there's only two captured groups, the (1234), and the (1234, 4657), the second one which I can only assume from your pattern to mean: "a digit string, followed by zero or more comma separated digit strings".
Well, a simple fix is to just allow all the possible characters in a character class. Which is to say change \d to [\d, ] to allow digits, commas and space.
Your regex as it is, though, does not match the first sample line, because it has a dash - in it (ab-cd/ABC1 does not match \w*\/\w+\d*\). Also, it is not a good idea to rely too heavily on the * quantifier, because it does match the empty string (it matches zero or more times), and should only be used for things which are truly optional. Use + otherwise, which matches (1 or more times).
You have a rather strict regex, and with slight variations in your data like this, it will fail. Only you know what your data looks like, and if you actually do need a strict regex. However, if your data is somewhat consistent, you can use a loose regex simply based on the email part:
sub extract_nums {
my $string = shift;
if ($string =~ /<[^>]*> *([\d, ]+):/) {
return $1 =~ /\d+/g; # return the extracted digits in a list
# return $1; # just return the string as-is
} else { return undef }
}
This assumes, of course, that you cannot have <> tags in front of the email part of the line. It will capture any digits, commas and spaces found between a <> tag and a colon, and then return a list of any digits found in the match. You can also just return the string, as shown in the commented line.
There would appear to be something missing from your examples. Is this what they're supposed to look like, with email?
(1234) First Last (ab-cd/ABC1), <foo.bar#domain.com> 1224: efadsfadsfdsf
(1234) First Last (abcd/ABC12), <foo.bar#domain.com> 1234, 4657: efadsfadsfdsf
If so, this should work:
\((\d+)\)\s\w*\s\w*\s\(\w*\/\w+\d*\),\s<\w*\.\w*\#\w*\.domain\.com>\s\d+(?:,\s(\d+))?:
$string =~ /.*>\s*(.+):.+/;
$numbers = $1;
That's it.
Tested.
With number catching:
$string =~ /.*>\s*(?([0-9]|,)+):.+/;
$numbers = $1;
Not tested but you get the idea.
I have run into another problem in relation to a site I am trying to scrape.
Basically I have stripped most of what I don't want from the page content and thanks to some help given here have managed to isolate the dates I wanted. Most of it seems to be working fine, despite some initial problems matching a non-breaking space. However, I am now having difficulty with the final regex, which is intended to split each line of data into fields. Each line represents the price of a share price index. The fields on each line are:
A name of arbitrary length made from characters from the latin alphabet and sometimes a comma or ampersand, no numerics.
A number with two digits after the decimal point (the absolute value of the index).
A number with two digits after the decimal point (the change in the value).
A number with two digits after the decimal point followed by a percent sign (the percentage change in value).
Here is an example string, before splitting:
"Fishery, Agriculture & Forestry243.45-1.91-0.78% Mining360.74-4.15-1.14% Construction465.36-1.01-0.22% Foods783.2511.281.46% Textiles & Apparels412.070.540.13% Pulp & Paper333.31-0.29-0.09% Chemicals729.406.010.83% "
The regex I am using to split this line is this:
$mystr =~ s/\n(.*?)(\d{1,4}\.\d{2})(\-?\d{1,3}\.\d{2})(.*?%)\n/\n$1 == $2 == $3 == $4\n/ig;
It works sometimes but not other times and I cannot work out why this should be. (The doubled equal signs in the example output below are used to make the field split more easily visible.)
Fishery, Agriculture & Forestry == 243.45 == -1.91 == -0.78%
Mining360.74-4.15-1.14%
Construction == 465.36 == -1.01 == -0.22%
Foods783.2511.281.46%
I thought the minus sign was an issue for those indices that saw a negative change in the price of the index, but sometimes it works despite the minus sign.
Q. Why is the final regex shown below failing to split the fields consistently?
Example code follows.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use HTML::Tree;
my $url_full = "http://www.tse.or.jp/english/market/STATISTICS/e06_past.html";
my $content = get($url_full);
# get dates:
(my #dates) = $content =~ /(?<=dateFormat\(')\d{4}\/\d{2}\/\d{2}(?='\))/g;
foreach my $date (#dates) { # convert to yyyy-mm-dd
$date =~ s/\//-/ig;
}
my $tree = HTML::Tree->new();
$tree->parse($content);
my $mystr = $tree->as_text;
$mystr =~ s/\xA0//gi; # remove non-breaking spaces
# remove first chunk of text:
$mystr =~
s/^(TSE.*?)IndustryIndexChange ?/IndustryIndexChange\n$dates[0]\n\n/gi;
$mystr =~ s/IndustryIndexChange ?/IndustryIndexChange/ig;
$mystr =~ s/IndustryIndexChange/Industry Index Change\n/ig;
$mystr =~ s/% /%\n/gi; # percent symbol is market for end of line
# indicate breaks between days:
$mystr =~ s/Stock.*?IndustryIndexChange/\nDAY DELIMITER\n/gi;
$mystr =~ s/Exemption from Liability.*$//g; # remove boilerplate at bottom
# and here's the problem regex...
# try to split it:
$mystr =~
s/\n(.*?)(\d{1,4}\.\d{2})(\-?\d{1,3}\.\d{2})(.*?%)\n/\n$1 == $2 == $3 == $4\n/ig;
print $mystr;
It appears to be doing every other one.
My guess is that your records have a single \n between them, but your pattern starts and ends with a \n. So the final \n on the first match consumes the \n that the second match needed to find the second record. The net result is that it picks up every other record.
You might be better off wrapping your pattern in ^ and $ (instead of \n and \n), and using the m flag on the s///.
The problem is that you have \n both at the start and at the end of the regex.
Consider something like this:
$s = 'abababa';
$s =~ s/aba/axa/g;
that will set $s to axabaxa, not axaxaxa, because there are only two non-overlapping occurrences of aba.
My interpretation (pseudocode) -
one = [a-zA-Z,& ]+
two = \d{1,4}.\d\d
three = <<two>>
four = <<two>>%
regex = (<<one>>)(<<two>>)(<<three>>)(<<four>>)
= ([a-zA-Z,& ]+)(\d{1,4}.\d\d)(\d{1,4}.\d\d)(\d{1,4}.\d\d%)
However, you are already presented with 'structured' data in the form of HTML. Why not take advantage of this?
HTML parsing in perl references MOJO
for DOM based parsing in perl, and unless there are serious performance reasons,
I'd highly recommend such an approach.