So I've got a big text file which looks like the following:
text;text;text;text;text - 5 words
text;text;text;text;text;text - 6 words
text;text;text;text;text;text;text - 7 words
How i can search lines with 6, 7,... words?
I try search with (.*);(.*);(.*);(.*);(.*);(.*); but not work :(
Note: Notepad++ does choke on my existing regex, but the OP adapted it to suit his need, see the comments for more.
First of all, you should be doing a regular expression search, not an extended search.
Here's the regex. Basically you match the first 5 words, then match at least one more after the first 5 (if you don't need to match the last semicolon, take out the ;?):
(.*);(.*);(.*);(.*);(.*)(;(.*))+;?
(You cannot use (.*)(;(.*)){5,} as Notepad++ doesn't support that syntax.)
Don't abuse the *. If you are trying to match at least one character, .+ is less ambiguous. In fact, if ; is the separator, you can try [^;]+ to be even more pedantic.
Related
Looking for a regular expression that extracts multiple characters, at different locations, in my string. For example, the string I'm working with is 5490028400316201600008 and it will always be this same length, but the numbers can change.
I would like to extract the first 9 characters, then skip the next 8, extract the next 4, then ignore the last character. The resulting string would be 5490028400000 in this case. I can't seem to find an easy way to do this and I'm fairly new to regular expressions. Thanks in advance for your advice/help.
First of all, this seems more appropiate for substring functions, they are usually faster and not so error-prone. However, for a learning purpose, you could come up with sth. like:
(.{9}).{8}(.{4}).
This matches any (not only digits, that is - for digits use \d instead) character 9 times, saves it in a group, matches another 8 characters which will not be saved, and will finally match another 4 characters into the second group.
Concenate $1 and $2 (5490028400000 in your case) and you should be fine.
See this demo on regex101.com.
I have some experience with regular expressions but I am far from expert level and need a way to match the record with the most explicit string in a file where each record begins with a unique 1-5 digit integer and is padded with various other characters when it is shorter than 5 digits. For example, my file has records that begin with:
32000
3201X
32014
320xy
In this example, the non-numeric characters represent wildcards. I thought the following regex examples would work but rather than match the record with the MOST explicit number, they always match the record with the LEAST explicit number. Remember, I do not know what is in the file so I need to test all possibilities to locate the MOST explicit match.
If I need to search for 32000, the regex looks something like:
/^3\D{4}|^32\D{3}|^320\D{2}|^3200\D|^32000/
It should match 32000 but it matches 320xy
If I need to search for 32014, the regex looks something like:
/^3\D{4}|^32\D{3}|^320\D{2}|^3201\D|^32014/
It should match 32014 but it matches 320xy
If I need to search for 32015, the regex looks something like:
/^3\D{4}|^32\D{3}|^320\D{2}|^3201\D|^32015/
It should match 3201x but it matches 320xy
In each case, the matched result is the LEAST specific numeric value. I also tried reversing the regex as follows by still get the same results:
/^32014|^3201\D|^320\D{2}|^32\D{3}|^3\D{4}/
Any help is much appreciated.
Okay, if you want to match a string literally then use anchors. Then specify the string you want matched. For instance match '123456xyz' where the xyz can be anything excep numeric use:
'^123456[^0-9]{3}$'
If you prefer specific letters to match at the end, if they will always be x y or z then use:
'^123456[xyz]{3}$'
Note the ^ and $ anchor the string to start with 12345 and end with three letters that are x y or z.
Good luck!
Ok, I did quite some tinkering here. I am 99% percent sure that this is pretty much impossible (if we don't cheat and interpolate code into the regex). The reason is you will need a negative lookbehind with variable length at some point.
However, I came up with two alternatives. One is if you want just to find the "most exact match", the second one is if you want to replace it with something. Here we go:
/(32000)|\A(?!.*32000).*(3200\D)|\A(?!.*3200[0\D]).*(320\D\D)|\A(?!.*320[0\D][0\D]).*(32\D\D\D)|\A(?!.*32[0\D][0\D][0\D]).*(3\D\D\D\D)/m
Question:
So what is my "most exact match" here?
Answer:
The concatenation of the 5 matched groups - \1\2\3\4\5. In fact always only one of them will match, the other 4 will be empty.
/(32000)|\A(?!.*32000)(.*)(3200\D)|\A(?!.*3200[0\D])(.*)(320\D\D)|\A(?!.*320[0\D][0\D])(.*)(32\D\D\D)|\A(?!.*32[0\D][0\D][0\D])(.*)(3\D\D\D\D)/m
Question:
How can I use this to replace my "most exact match"?
Answer:
In this case your "most exact match" will be the concatenation of \1\3\5\7\9, but we will have also matched some other things before that, namely \2\4\6\8 (again, only one of these can be non empty). Therefore if you want to replace your "most exact match" with fubar you can match with the above regex and replace with \2\4\6\8fubar
Another way you can think about it (and might be helpful) is that your "most exact match" will be the last matched line of either of the two regexes.
Two things to note here:
I used Ruby style RE, \A means the beginning of the string (not the beginning of a line - ^). \m means multi line mode. You should be able to find syntax for the same things in your language/technology as long as it uses some flavor of PCRE.
This can be slow. If we don't find exact match we might possibly have to match and replace the entire string (if the non exact match can be found at the end of the string).
I am trying to extract a zip code of six numbers starting with the number 4 from a string. Right now I am using [4][0-9]{5}, but it is also matching starting from other numbers, like 020-25468811 and it's returning 468811. I don't want it to search in the middle of a number, only full numbers.
Try to use the following:
(?<!\d)4\d{5}(?!\d)
I.e. find 6-digit number starting with 4 and not preceded or followed by digit.
Your expression right now tries to match any six numbers consisting of a 4 with five numbers between 0 and 9. To fix this behavior you should add word boundaries as per Jon's suggestion.
\b[4][0-9]{5}\b
More on word boundaries here: http://www.regular-expressions.info/wordboundaries.html
You could simply add a space to the beginning of your regular expression " 4[0-9]{5}". If you need a more universal way of finding the beginning of the number (could it maybe be also be tabulator, a newline, etc?) you should have look at the predefined character class \s. Also have a look at boundary matchers. I dont know which language you are using, but regex work very similar in most languages. Check this Java regex documentation.
There is a start of line character in regex: ^
You could do:
^4[0-9]{5}
If the numbers are not always in the beginning of a line, you can more generally use:
\<4[0-9]{5}\>
To match only whole words.
Both examples work with egrep.
I’m working with a text file with 200.000+ lines in Notepad++. Each line has only one word. I need to strip out and remove all words which only contains one letter (e.g.: I) and words which contains only two letters (e.g.: as).
I thought I could just pas in regular regex like this [a-zA-Z]{1,2} but I does not recognize anything (I’m trying to Mark them).
I’ve done manual search and I know that there do exists words of that length so therefor can it only be my regex code that’s wrong. Anyone knows how to do this in Notepad++ ???
Cheers,
- Mestika
If you want to remove only the words but leave the lines empty, this works:
^[a-zA-Z]{1,2}$
Replace this with an empty string. ^ and $ are anchors for the beginning and the end of a line (because Notepad++'s regexes work in multi-line mode).
If you want to remove the lines completely, search for this:
^[a-zA-Z]{1,2}\r\n
And replace with an empty string. However, this won't work before Notepad++ 6, so make sure yours is up-to-date.
Note that you will have to replace \r\n with the specific line-endings of your file!
As Tim Pietzker suggested, a platform independent solution that also removes empty lines would be:
^[a-zA-Z]{1,2}[\r\n]+
A platform-independent solution that does not remove empty lines but only those with one or two letters would be:
^[a-zA-Z]{1,2}(\r\n?|\n)
I don't use Notepad++ but my guess is it could be because you have too many matches - try including word boundaries (your exp will match every set of 2 letters)
\b[a-zA-Z]{1,2}\b
The regex you specified should find 1-or-2 characters (even in Notepad++'s Find-dialog), but not in the way you'd think. You want to have the regex make sure it starts at the beginning of the line and ends at the end with ^ and $, respecitevely:
^[a-zA-Z]{1,2}$
Notepad++ version 6.0 introduced the PCRE engine, so if this doesn't work in your current version try updating to the most recent.
You seem to use the version of Notepad++ that doesn't support explicit quantifiers: that's why there's no match at all (as { and } are treated as literals, not special symbols).
The solution is to use their somewhat more lengthy replacement:
\w\w?
... but that's only part of the story, as this regex will match any symbol, and not just short words. To do that, you need something like this:
^\w\w?$
I'm using vim to do some pattern matching on a text file. I've enabled search highlighting so that I know exactly what is getting matched on each search and am getting confused.
Consider searching for [a-z]* on the following text:123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyxz987654321ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWQXZ
I expected this search to match zero or more consecutive characters that are in the range [a-z]. Instead, I get a match on the entire line.
Should this be the expected behaviour?
Thanks,
Andrew
It's matching the empty strings that occur after every character. It has no way of highlighting empty ranges, so it looks like everything is highlighted.
Try searching for [a-z]\+ instead.
Empty string matches [a-z]*... therefore this thing is matching everywhere. Perhaps you want to cut down some of the cases by doing [a-z]+ (1 or more), or [a-z]{4,} (4 or more).
You're not getting a match on the entire line, you're getting a match on every character. Your pattern also matches nothing at all, which is matched by every single character.