I'm trying to get the list of all digits preceding a hyphen in a given string (let's say in cell A1), using a Google Sheets regex formula :
=REGEXEXTRACT(A1, "\d-")
My problem is that it only returns the first match... how can I get all matches?
Example text:
"A1-Nutrition;A2-ActPhysiq;A2-BioMeta;A2-Patho-jour;A2-StgMrktg2;H2-Bioth2/EtudeCas;H2-Bioth2/Gemmo;H2-Bioth2/Oligo;H2-Bioth2/Opo;H2-Bioth2/Organo;H3-Endocrino;H3-Génétiq"
My formula returns 1-, whereas I want to get 1-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-3-3- (either as an array or concatenated text).
I know I could use a script or another function (like SPLIT) to achieve the desired result, but what I really want to know is how I could get a re2 regular expression to return such multiple matches in a "REGEX.*" Google Sheets formula.
Something like the "global - Don't return after first match" option on regex101.com
I've also tried removing the undesired text with REGEXREPLACE, with no success either (I couldn't get rid of other digits not preceding a hyphen).
Any help appreciated!
Thanks :)
You can actually do this in a single formula using regexreplace to surround all the values with a capture group instead of replacing the text:
=join("",REGEXEXTRACT(A1,REGEXREPLACE(A1,"(\d-)","($1)")))
basically what it does is surround all instances of the \d- with a "capture group" then using regex extract, it neatly returns all the captures. if you want to join it back into a single string you can just use join to pack it back into a single cell:
You may create your own custom function in the Script Editor:
function ExtractAllRegex(input, pattern,groupId) {
return [Array.from(input.matchAll(new RegExp(pattern,'g')), x=>x[groupId])];
}
Or, if you need to return all matches in a single cell joined with some separator:
function ExtractAllRegex(input, pattern,groupId,separator) {
return Array.from(input.matchAll(new RegExp(pattern,'g')), x=>x[groupId]).join(separator);
}
Then, just call it like =ExtractAllRegex(A1, "\d-", 0, ", ").
Description:
input - current cell value
pattern - regex pattern
groupId - Capturing group ID you want to extract
separator - text used to join the matched results.
Edit
I came up with more general solution:
=regexreplace(A1,"(.)?(\d-)|(.)","$2")
It replaces any text except the second group match (\d-) with just the second group $2.
"(.)?(\d-)|(.)"
1 2 3
Groups are in ()
---------------------------------------
"$2" -- means return the group number 2
Learn regular expressions: https://regexone.com
Try this formula:
=regexreplace(regexreplace(A1,"[^\-0-9]",""),"(\d-)|(.)","$1")
It will handle string like this:
"A1-Nutrition;A2-ActPhysiq;A2-BioM---eta;A2-PH3-Généti***566*9q"
with output:
1-2-2-2-3-
I wasn't able to get the accepted answer to work for my case. I'd like to do it that way, but needed a quick solution and went with the following:
Input:
1111 days, 123 hours 1234 minutes and 121 seconds
Expected output:
1111 123 1234 121
Formula:
=split(REGEXREPLACE(C26,"[a-z,]"," ")," ")
The shortest possible regex:
=regexreplace(A1,".?(\d-)|.", "$1")
Which returns 1-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-3-3- for "A1-Nutrition;A2-ActPhysiq;A2-BioMeta;A2-Patho-jour;A2-StgMrktg2;H2-Bioth2/EtudeCas;H2-Bioth2/Gemmo;H2-Bioth2/Oligo;H2-Bioth2/Opo;H2-Bioth2/Organo;H3-Endocrino;H3-Génétiq".
Explanation of regex:
.? -- optional character
(\d-) -- capture group 1 with a digit followed by a dash (specify (\d+-) multiple digits)
| -- logical or
. -- any character
the replacement "$1" uses just the capture group 1, and discards anything else
Learn more about regex: https://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/TWikiPresentation2018x10x14Regex
This seems to work and I have tried to verify it.
The logic is
(1) Replace letter followed by hyphen with nothing
(2) Replace any digit not followed by a hyphen with nothing
(3) Replace everything which is not a digit or hyphen with nothing
=regexreplace(A1,"[a-zA-Z]-|[0-9][^-]|[a-zA-Z;/é]","")
Result
1-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-3-3-
Analysis
I had to step through these procedurally to convince myself that this was correct. According to this reference when there are alternatives separated by the pipe symbol, regex should match them in order left-to-right. The above formula doesn't work properly unless rule 1 comes first (otherwise it reduces all characters except a digit or hyphen to null before rule (1) can come into play and you get an extra hyphen from "Patho-jour").
Here are some examples of how I think it must deal with the text
The solution to capture groups with RegexReplace and then do the RegexExctract works here too, but there is a catch.
=join("",REGEXEXTRACT(A1,REGEXREPLACE(A1,"(\d-)","($1)")))
If the cell that you are trying to get the values has Special Characters like parentheses "(" or question mark "?" the solution provided won´t work.
In my case, I was trying to list all “variables text” contained in the cell. Those “variables text “ was wrote inside like that: “{example_name}”. But the full content of the cell had special characters making the regex formula do break. When I removed theses specials characters, then I could list all captured groups like the solution did.
There are two general ('Excel' / 'native' / non-Apps Script) solutions to return an array of regex matches in the style of REGEXEXTRACT:
Method 1)
insert a delimiter around matches, remove junk, and call SPLIT
Regexes work by iterating over the string from left to right, and 'consuming'. If we are careful to consume junk values, we can throw them away.
(This gets around the problem faced by the currently accepted solution, which is that as Carlos Eduardo Oliveira mentions, it will obviously fail if the corpus text contains special regex characters.)
First we pick a delimiter, which must not already exist in the text. The proper way to do this is to parse the text to temporarily replace our delimiter with a "temporary delimiter", like if we were going to use commas "," we'd first replace all existing commas with something like "<<QUOTED-COMMA>>" then un-replace them later. BUT, for simplicity's sake, we'll just grab a random character such as from the private-use unicode blocks and use it as our special delimiter (note that it is 2 bytes... google spreadsheets might not count bytes in graphemes in a consistent way, but we'll be careful later).
=SPLIT(
LAMBDA(temp,
MID(temp, 1, LEN(temp)-LEN(""))
)(
REGEXREPLACE(
"xyzSixSpaces:[ ]123ThreeSpaces:[ ]aaaa 12345",".*?( |$)",
"$1"
)
),
""
)
We just use a lambda to define temp="match1match2match3", then use that to remove the last delimiter into "match1match2match3", then SPLIT it.
Taking COLUMNS of the result will prove that the correct result is returned, i.e. {" ", " ", " "}.
This is a particularly good function to turn into a Named Function, and call it something like REGEXGLOBALEXTRACT(text,regex) or REGEXALLEXTRACT(text,regex), e.g.:
=SPLIT(
LAMBDA(temp,
MID(temp, 1, LEN(temp)-LEN(""))
)(
REGEXREPLACE(
text,
".*?("®ex&"|$)",
"$1"
)
),
""
)
Method 2)
use recursion
With LAMBDA (i.e. lets you define a function like any other programming language), you can use some tricks from the well-studied lambda calculus and function programming: you have access to recursion. Defining a recursive function is confusing because there's no easy way for it to refer to itself, so you have to use a trick/convention:
trick for recursive functions: to actually define a function f which needs to refer to itself, instead define a function that takes a parameter of itself and returns the function you actually want; pass in this 'convention' to the Y-combinator to turn it into an actual recursive function
The plumbing which takes such a function work is called the Y-combinator. Here is a good article to understand it if you have some programming background.
For example to get the result of 5! (5 factorial, i.e. implement our own FACT(5)), we could define:
Named Function Y(f)=LAMBDA(f, (LAMBDA(x,x(x)))( LAMBDA(x, f(LAMBDA(y, x(x)(y)))) ) ) (this is the Y-combinator and is magic; you don't have to understand it to use it)
Named Function MY_FACTORIAL(n)=
Y(LAMBDA(self,
LAMBDA(n,
IF(n=0, 1, n*self(n-1))
)
))
result of MY_FACTORIAL(5): 120
The Y-combinator makes writing recursive functions look relatively easy, like an introduction to programming class. I'm using Named Functions for clarity, but you could just dump it all together at the expense of sanity...
=LAMBDA(Y,
Y(LAMBDA(self, LAMBDA(n, IF(n=0,1,n*self(n-1))) ))(5)
)(
LAMBDA(f, (LAMBDA(x,x(x)))( LAMBDA(x, f(LAMBDA(y, x(x)(y)))) ) )
)
How does this apply to the problem at hand? Well a recursive solution is as follows:
in pseudocode below, I use 'function' instead of LAMBDA, but it's the same thing:
// code to get around the fact that you can't have 0-length arrays
function emptyList() {
return {"ignore this value"}
}
function listToArray(myList) {
return OFFSET(myList,0,1)
}
function allMatches(text, regex) {
allMatchesHelper(emptyList(), text, regex)
}
function allMatchesHelper(resultsToReturn, text, regex) {
currentMatch = REGEXEXTRACT(...)
if (currentMatch succeeds) {
textWithoutMatch = SUBSTITUTE(text, currentMatch, "", 1)
return allMatches(
{resultsToReturn,currentMatch},
textWithoutMatch,
regex
)
} else {
return listToArray(resultsToReturn)
}
}
Unfortunately, the recursive approach is quadratic order of growth (because it's appending the results over and over to itself, while recreating the giant search string with smaller and smaller bites taken out of it, so 1+2+3+4+5+... = big^2, which can add up to a lot of time), so may be slow if you have many many matches. It's better to stay inside the regex engine for speed, since it's probably highly optimized.
You could of course avoid using Named Functions by doing temporary bindings with LAMBDA(varName, expr)(varValue) if you want to use varName in an expression. (You can define this pattern as a Named Function =cont(varValue) to invert the order of the parameters to keep code cleaner, or not.)
Whenever I use varName = varValue, write that instead.
to see if a match succeeds, use ISNA(...)
It would look something like:
Named Function allMatches(resultsToReturn, text, regex):
UNTESTED:
LAMBDA(helper,
OFFSET(
helper({"ignore"}, text, regex),
0,1)
)(
Y(LAMBDA(helperItself,
LAMBDA(results, partialText,
LAMBDA(currentMatch,
IF(ISNA(currentMatch),
results,
LAMBDA(textWithoutMatch,
helperItself({results,currentMatch}, textWithoutMatch)
)(
SUBSTITUTE(partialText, currentMatch, "", 1)
)
)
)(
REGEXEXTRACT(partialText, regex)
)
)
))
)
In have following code:
set[str] noNnoE = { v | str v <- eu, (/\b[^eEnN]*\b/ := v) };
The goal is to filter out of a set of strings (called 'eu'), those strings that have no 'e' or 'n' in them (both upper- and lowercase). The regular expression I've provided:
/\b[^eEnN]?\b/
seems to work like it should, when I try it out in an online regex-tester.
When trying it out in the Rascel terminal it doesn't seem to work:
rascal>/\b[^eEnN]*\b/ := "Slander";
bool: true
I expected no match. What am I missing here? I'm using the latest (stable) Rascal release in Eclipse Oxygen1a.
Actually, the online regex-tester is giving the same match that we are giving. You can look at the match as follows:
if (/<w1:\b[^eEnN]?\b>/ := "Slander")
println("The match is: |<w1>|");
This is assigning the matched string to w1 and then printing it between the vertical bars, assuming the match succeeds (if it doesn't, it returns false, so the body of the if will not execute). If you do this, you will get back a match to the empty string:
The match is: ||
The online regex tester says the same thing:
Match 1
Full match 0-0 ''
If you want to prevent this, you can force at least one occurrence of the characters you are looking for by using a +, versus a ?:
rascal>/\b[^eEnN]+\b/ := "Slander";
bool: false
Note that you can also make the regex match case insensitive by following it with an i, like so:
/\b[^en]+\b/i
This may make it easier to write if you need to add more characters into the character class.
This solution (/\b[^en]+\b/i) doesn't work for strings consisting of two words, such as the Czech Republic.
Try /\b[^en]+\b$/i. That seems to work for me.
Okay so I wanted a regex to parse uncontracted(if that's what it is called) ipv6 adresses
Example ipv6 adress: 1050:::600:5:1000::
What I want returned: 1050:0000:0000:600:5:1000:0000:0000
My try at this:
ip:gsub("%:([^0-9a-zA-Z])", ":0000")
The first problem with this: It replaces the first and second :
So :: gets replaced with :0000
Replacing it with :0000: wouldn't work because then it will end with a :. Also this would note parse the newly added : resulting in: 1050:0000::600:5:1000:0000:
So what would I need this regex to do?
Replace every : by :0000 if it isn't followed by a number or letter
Main problem: :: gets replaced instead of 1 :
gsub and other functions from Lua's string library use Lua Patterns which are much simpler than regex. Using the pattern more than once will handle the cases where the pattern overlaps the replacement text. The pattern only needs to be applied twice since the first time will catch even pairings and the second will catch the odd/new pairings of colons. The trailing and leading colons can be handled separately with their own patterns.
ip = "1050:::600:5:1000::"
ip = ip:gsub("^:", "0000:"):gsub(":$", ":0000")
ip = ip:gsub("::", ":0000:"):gsub("::", ":0000:")
print(ip) -- 1050:0000:0000:600:5:1000:0000:0000
There is no single statement pattern to do this but you can use a function to do this for any possible input:
function fill_ip(s)
local ans = {}
for s in (s..':'):gmatch('(%x*):') do
if s == '' then s = '0000' end
ans[ #ans+1 ] = s
end
return table.concat(ans,':')
end
--examples:
print(fill_ip('1050:::600:5:1000::'))
print(fill_ip(':1050:::600:5:1000:'))
print(fill_ip('1050::::600:5:1000:1'))
print(fill_ip(':::::::'))
I want to use a regular expression that would do the following thing ( i extracted the part where i'm in trouble in order to simplify ):
any character for 1 to 5 first characters, then an "underscore", then some digits, then an "underscore", then some digits or dot.
With a restriction on "underscore" it should give something like that:
^([^_]{1,5})_([\\d]{2,3})_([\\d\\.]*)$
But i want to allow the "_" in the 1-5 first characters in case it still match the end of the regular expression, for example if i had somethink like:
to_to_123_12.56
I think this is linked to an eager problem in the regex engine, nevertheless, i tried to do some lazy stuff like explained here but without sucess.
Any idea ?
I used the following regex and it appeared to work fine for your task. I've simply replaced your initial [^_] with ..
^.{1,5}_\d{2,3}_[\d\.]*$
It's probably best to replace your final * with + too, unless you allow nothing after the final '_'. And note your final part allows multiple '.' (I don't know if that's what you want or not).
For the record, here's a quick Python script I used to verify the regex:
import re
strs = [ "a_12_1",
"abc_12_134",
"abcd_123_1.",
"abcde_12_1",
"a_123_123.456.7890.",
"a_12_1",
"ab_de_12_1",
]
myre = r"^.{1,5}_\d{2,3}_[\d\.]+$"
for str in strs:
m = re.match(myre, str)
if m:
print "Yes:",
if m.group(0) == str:
print "ALL",
else:
print "No:",
print str
Output is:
Yes: ALL a_12_1
Yes: ALL abc_12_134
Yes: ALL abcd_134_1.
Yes: ALL abcde_12_1
Yes: ALL a_123_123.456.7890.
Yes: ALL a_12_1
Yes: ALL ab_de_12_1
^(.{1,5})_(\d{2,3})_([\d.]*)$
works for your example. The result doesn't change whether you use a lazy quantifier or not.
While answering the comment ( writing the lazy expression ), i saw that i did a mistake... if i simply use the folowing classical regex, it works:
^(.{1,5})_([\\d]{2,3})_([\\d\\.]*)$
Thank you.
I have a string
IsNull(VSK1_DVal.RuntimeSUM,0),
I need to remove IsNull part, so the result would be
VSK1_DVal.RuntimeSUM,
I'm absolute new to RegEx, but it wouldn't be a problem, if not one thing :
VSK1 is dynamic part, can be any combination of A-Z,0-9 and any length. How to replace strings with RegEx? I use MSSQL 2k5, i think it uses general set of RegEx rules.
EDIT : I forgot to say, that I'm doing replacement in SSMS Query window's Replace Box (^H) - not building RegEx query
br
marius
here's a regex that should work:
[^(]+\(([^,]+),[^)]\)
Then use $1 capture group to extract the part that you need.
I did a sanity check in ruby:
orig = "IsNull(VSK1_DVal.RuntimeSUM,0),"
regex = /[^(]*\(([^,]+),[^)]\)/
result = orig.sub(regex){$1} # result => VSK1_DVal.RuntimeSUM,
It gets trickier if you have a prefix that you want to retain. Like if you have this:
"somestuff = IsNull(VSK1_DVal.RuntimeSUM,0),"
In this case, you need someway to identify the start of the pattern. Maybe you can use '=' to identify the start of the pattern? If so, this should work:
orig = "somestuff = IsNull(VSK1_DVal.RuntimeSUM,0),"
regex = /=\s*\w+\(([^,]+),[^)]\)/
result = orig.sub(regex){$1} # result => somestuff = VSK1_DVal.RuntimeSUM,
But then the case where you don't have an equals sign will fail. Maybe you can use 'IsNull' to identify the start of the pattern? If so, try this (note the '/i' representing case insensitive matching):
orig = "somestuff = isnull(VSK1_DVal.RuntimeSUM,0),"
regex = /IsNull\(([^,]+),[^)]\)/i
result = orig.sub(regex){$1} # result => somestuff = VSK1_DVal.RuntimeSUM,
/IsNULL\((A-Z0-9+),0\)/
Then pick group match number 1.
Here's a very useful site: http://www.regexlib.com/RETester.aspx
They have a tester and a cheatsheet that are very useful for quick testing of this sort.
I tested the solution by Dave and it works fine except it also removes the trailing comma you wanted retained. Minor thing to fix.
Try this:
IsNULL\((.*,)0\)
You say in your question
I use MSSQL 2k5, i think it uses
general set of RegEx rules.
This is not true unless you enable CLR and compile and install an assembly. You can use its native pattern matching syntax and LIKE for this as below.
WITH T(C) AS
(
SELECT 'IsNull(VSK1_DVal.RuntimeSUM,0),' UNION ALL
SELECT 'IsNull(VSK1_DVal.RuntimeSUM,123465),' UNION ALL
SELECT 'No Match'
)
SELECT SUBSTRING(C,8,1+LEN(C)-8-CHARINDEX(',',REVERSE(C),2))
FROM T
WHERE C LIKE 'IsNull(%,_%),'