I am new to regex and struggling to create an expression to parse a csv containing 1 to n values. The values can be integers or real numbers. The sample inputs would be:
1
1,2,3,4,5
1,2.456, 3.08, 0.5, 7
This would be used in c#.
Thanks,
Jerry
Use a CSV parser instead of RegEx.
There are several options - see this SO questions and answers and this one for the different options (built into the BCL and third party libraries).
The BCL provides the TextFieldParser (within the VisualBasic namespace, but don't let that put you off it).
A third party library that is liked by many is filehelpers.
Using REGEX for CSV parsing has been a 10 year jihad for me. I have found it remarkably frustrating, due to the boundary cases:
Numbers come in a variety of forms (here in the US, Canada):
1
1.
1.0
1000
1000.
1,000
1e3
1.0e3
1.0e+3
1.0e+003
-1
-1.0 (etc)
But of course, Europe has traditionally been different with regard to commas and decimal points:
1
1,0
1000
1.000e3
1e3
1,0e3
1,0e+3
1,0e+003
Which just ruins everything. So, we ignore the German and French and Continental standard because the comma just is impossible to work out whether it is separating values, or part of values. (The Continent likes TAB instead of COMMA)
I'll assume that you're "just" looking for numerical values separated from each other by commas and possible space-padding. The expression:
\s*(\-?\d+(?:\.\d*)?(?:[eE][\-+]?\d*)?)\s*
is a pretty fair parser of A NUMBER. Catches just about every reasonable case. Doesn't deal with imbedded commas though! It also trims off spaces, either side of the number.
From there, you can either build an iterative CSV string decomposer (walking each field, absorbing commas, assigning to an array, say), or use the scanf type function to do the same thing. I do prefer the iterative decomposition method - as it also allows you to parse out strings, hexadecimal, and virtually any other pattern you find in the data.
The regex you want is
#"([+-]?\d+(?:\.\d+)?)(?:$|,\s*)"
...from which you'll want capture group 1. However, don't use regex for something like this. String manipulation is much better when the input is in a very static, predictable format:
string[] nums = strInput.split(", ".ToCharArray(), StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
List<float> results = (from n in nums
select float.Parse(n)).ToList();
If you do use regex, make sure you do a global capture.
I think you would have to loop it to check for an unknown number of ints... or else something like this:
/ *([0-9.]*) *,? *([0-9.]*) *,? *([0-9.]*) *,? *([0-9.]*) *,? *([0-9.]*) */
and you could keep that going ",?([0-9]*)" as far as you wanted to, to account for a lot of numbers. The result would be an array of numbers....
http://jsfiddle.net/8URvL/1/
Related
I have the following sets:
NUMBER [0-9]+
DECIMAL ("."{NUMBER})|({NUMBER}("."{NUMBER}?)?)
REAL {DECIMAL}([eE][+-]?{NUMBER})?
and I want my lexer to accept real numbers like:
0.002 or 0.004e-10 or .01
the problem is that I want it ignore the leading zeros but to keep the rest of the number for example:
when I give 000.0002 I want to keep 0.0002 and when I give 0.2e-0100 I want to keep 0.2e-100
So I was thinking something like the atof function but I do not know how to do it exactly.
Any thoughts?
Thanks in advance
lex will return the complete token that your pattern matches as one string. You cannot change that. At the expense of considerable complexity you could use start conditions to match a leading zero (which may be the only digit), and collect tokens for the pieces, e.g.,
0.2e-0100
as
0.2e-
0
100
and glue the first/last tokens together but you would find it much simpler to develop your own string function which filters out the unwanted leading zeroes.
My question is a continuation of this one. Basically, I have a table of words like so:
HAT18178_890909.098070313.1
HAT18178_890909.098070313.2
HAT18178_890909.143412462.1
HAT18178_890909.143412462.2
For my purposes, I do not need the terminal .1 or .2 for this set of names. I can manually write the following regex (using Python syntax):
r = re.compile('(.*\.\d+)\.\d+')
However, I cannot guarantee that my next set of names will have a similar structure where the final 2 characters will be discardable - it could be 3 characters (i.e. .12) and the separator could change as well (i.e. . to _).
What is the appropriate way to either explicitly learn a regex or to determine which characters are unnecessary?
It's an interesting problem.
X y
HAT18178_890909.098070313.1 HAT18178_890909.098070313
HAT18178_890909.098070313.2 HAT18178_890909.098070313
HAT18178_890909.143412462.1 HAT18178_890909.143412462
HAT18178_890909.143412462.2 HAT18178_890909.143412462
The problem is that there is not a single solution but many.
Even for a human it is not clear what the regex should be that you want.
Based on this data, I would think the possibilities to learn are:
Just match a fixed width of 25: .{25}
Fixed first part: HAT18178_890909.
Then:
There's only 2 varying numbers on each single spot (as you show 2 cases).
So e.g. [01] (either 0 or 1), [94] the next spot and so on would be a good solution.
The obvious one would be \d+
But it could also be \d{9}
You see, there are multiple correct answers.
These regexes would still work if the second point would be an underscore instead.
My conclusion:
The problem is that it is much more work to prepare the data for machine learning than it is to create a regex. If you want to be sure you cover everything, you need to have complete data, so then a regex is probably less effort.
You could split on non-alphanumeric characters;
[^a-zA-Z0-9']+
That would get you, in this case, few strings like this:
HAT18178
890909
098070313
1
From there on you can simply discard the last one if that's never necessary, and continue on processing the first sequences
Fairly new to classic ASP(maintaining legacy applications) and I need to figure out how to fish out values from a string. String itself can look something like this - 0,12,234,543. I was thinking about making a function where I can specify which number I want from the string for ex.
Function fnGetNumber(string, 3)
// returns the third number(number after the second comma ie. 234)
End Function
The string will always have only numbers and always 4 of them. Also they will not have decimal places.
The function itself is not a problem, but I can't figure out the regex.
Using Split is the way, use it to transform the string to an array and pull the data from that.
I wouldn't recommend regex as whilst it powerful, its readability is poor.
I have a list of numbers that I want to find at least 3 of...
here is an example
I have a large list of numbers in a sql database in the format of (for example)
01-02-03-04-05-06
06-08-19-24-25-36
etc etc
basically 6 random numbers between 0 and 99.
Now I want to find the strings where at least 3 of a set of given numbers occurs.
For example:
given: 01-02-03-10-11-12
return the strings that have at least 3 of those numbers in them.
eg
01-05-06-09-10-12 would match
03-08-10-12-18-22 would match
03-09-12-18-22-38 would not
I am thinking that there might be some algorithm or even regular expression that could match this... but my lack of computer science textbook experience is tripping me up I think.
No - this is not a homework question! This is for an actual application!
I am developing in ruby, but any language answer would be appreciated
You can use a string replacement to replace - with | to turn 01-02-03-10-11-12 into 01|02|03|10|11|12. Then wrap it like this:
((01|02|03|10|11|12).*){3}
This will find any of the digit pairs, then ignore any number of characters... 3 times. If it matches, then success.
I would like to write a regular expression to validate and input field against the following arguments:
field is required (cannot be
empty)
field must not be a negative number
field must be a validate decimal
number to two decimals (eg. 1 or 1.3
or 1.23)
field can be any valid number between 0 and 100 or an 'e'
Regular expressions find great use in checking format, but you're wishing to use it to do a subset of floating point number parsing and bounds checking. Be kind to yourself and the person who will maintain your code after you're gone: check if it's an 'e', else read it into a float and check the bounds.
You can use: ^(100|\d{1,2}(\.\d{1,2})?|e)$
However, it would be simpler and more readable to use your language's float parsing/casting functions.
EDIT: Some variations based on the comments:
Allowing 100.0 and 100.00: ^(100(\.0{1,2})?|\d{1,2}(\.\d{1,2})?|e)$
Disallowing leading zeroes: ^(100(\.0{1,2})?|[1-9]?\d(\.\d{1,2})?|e)$
^(?:100|\d{1,2}(?:\.\d{1,2})?|e)$
Hmm does this work for you?
^((100|[0-9]{1,2})(\.[0-9]{1,2})?)|(e)$
Whay environment is this for? Any particular regex standard it must adhere to?
Constraints on numeric values (such as "> 100", or "<= 5.3") can make regexes rather complicated. These types of contraints are better checkedin application logic. Then you can have a simpler (and easier to understand) pattern:
^(([0-9]{1,3})(\.[0-9]{1,2})?)|(e)$
And then extract the capture group for the first 3 digits and validate that separately.
Edit:
Ok I think this one should do it (last one because my eyes are getting tired):
^(100(\.0{1,2})?)|([0-9]{1,2})(\.[0-9]{1,2})?|(e)$
Will also allow 100.00 or 100.0