What would the regular expression be to return 'details.jsp' (without quotes!) from this original tag. I can quite easily match all of value="details.jsp" but am having trouble just matching the contents within the attribute.
<s:include value="details.jsp" />
Any help greatly appreciated!
Thanks
Lawrence
/value=["']([^'"]+)/ would place "details.jsp" in the first capture group.
Edit:
In response to ircmaxell's comment, if you really need it, the following expression is more flexible:
/value=(['"])(.+)\1/
It will match things like <s:include value="something['else']">, but just note that the value will be placed in the second capture group.
But as mentioned before, regex is not what you want to use for parsing XML (unless it's a really simple case), so don't invest too much time into complex regexes when you should be using a parser.
Related
Hopefully someone can help me out. Been all over google now.
I'm doing some zone-ocr of documents, and want to extract some text with regex. It is always like this:
"Til: Name Name Name org.nr 12323123".
I want to extract the name-part, it can be 1-4 names, but "Til:" and "org.nr" is always before and after.
Anyone?
If you can't use capturing groups (check your documentation) you can try this:
(?<=Til:).*?(?=org\.nr)
This solution is using look behind and lookahead assertions, but those are not supported from every regex flavour. If they are working, this regex will return only the part you want, because the parts in the assertions are not matched, it checks only if the patterns in the assertions are there.
Use the pattern:
Til:(.*)org\.nr
Then take the second group to get the content between the parenthesis.
I am converting XML children into the element parameters and have a dirty regex script I used in Textmate. I know that dot (.) doesn't search for newlines, so this is how I got it to resolve.
Search
language="(.*)"
(.*)<education>(.*)(\n)?(.*)?(\n)?(.*)?(\n)?(.*)?</education>
(.*)<years>(.*)</years>
(.*)<grade>(.*)</grade>
Replace
grade="$13" language="$1" years="$11">
<education>$3$4$5$6$7$8$9</education>
I know there's a better way to do this. Please help me build my regex skills further.
Use an xml parser, don't use regex to parse xml.
If there are no other tags inside the <education> element, I would change that part to:
<education>([^<>]*)</education>
If possible, I would use the same technique everywhere else you're using .*. In the case of the language attribute, it would take this form:
language="([^"]*)"
In need of a regex master here!
<img src="\img.gif" style="float:left; border:0" />
<img src="\img.gif" style="border:0; float:right" />
Given the above HTML, I need a regex pattern that will match "float:right" or "float:left" but only on an img tag.
Thanks in advance!
/<img\s[^>]*style\s*=\s*"[^"]*\bfloat\s*:\s*(left|right)[^"]*"/i
Have to advise you, though: in my experience, no matter what regex you write, someone will be able to come up with valid HTML that breaks it. If you really want to do this in a general, reliable way, you need to parse the HTML, not throw regexes at it.
You really shouldn't use regex to parse html or xml, it's impossible to design a foolproof regex that will handle all corner cases. Instead, I would suggest finding an html-parsing library for your language of choice.
That said, here's a possible solution using regex.
<img\s[^>]*?style\s*=\s*".*?(?<"|;)(float:.*?)(?=;|").*?"
The "float:" will be captured in the only capturing group there, which should be number 1.
The regex basically matches the start of an img tag, followed by any type of character that isn't a close bracket any number of times, followed by the style attribute. Within the style attribute's value, the float: can be anywhere within the attribute, but it should only match the actual float style (i.e. it's preceded by the start of the attribute or a semicolon and followed by a semicolon or the end of the attribute).
I agree with Sean Nyman, it's best not to use a regex (at least not for anything permanent). For something ad-hoc and a bit more durable, you might try:
/<img\s(?:\s*\w+\s*=\s*(?:'[^']*'|"[^"]*"))*?\s*\bstyle\s*=\s*(?:"[^"]*?\bfloat\s*:\s*(\w+)|'[^']*?float\s*:\s*(\w+)/i
I'm being lazy tonight and don't want to figure this one out. I need a regex to match 'jeremy.miller' and 'scottgu' from the following inputs:
http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller/archive/2009/08/26/talking-about-storyteller-and-executable-requirements-on-elegant-code.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/08/25/clean-web-config-files-vs-2010-and-net-4-0-series.aspx
Ideas?
Edit
Chris Lutz did a great job of meeting the requirements above. What if these were the inputs so you couldn't use 'archive' in the regex?
http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller/
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/
Would this be what you're looking for?
'/([^/]+)/archive/'
Captures the piece before "archive" in both cases. Depending on regex flavor you'll need to escape the /s for it to work. As an alternative, if you don't want to match the archive part, you could use a lookahead, but I don't like lookaheads, and it's easier to match a lot and just capture the parts you need (in my opinion), so if you prefer to use a lookahead to verify that the next part is archive, you can write one yourself.
EDIT: As you update your question, my idea of what you want is becoming fuzzier. If you want a new regex to match the second cases, you can just pluck the appropriate part off the end, with the same / conditions as before:
'/([^/]+)/$'
If you specifically want either the text jeremy.miller or scottgu, regardless of where they occur in a URL, but only as "words" in the URL (i.e. not scottgu2), try this, once again with the / caveat:
'/(jeremy\.miller|scottgu)/'
As yet a third alternative, if you want the field after the domain name, unless that field is "blogs", it's going to get hairy, especially with the / caveat:
'http://[^/]+/(?:blogs/)?([^/]+)/'
This will match the domain name, an optional blogs field, and then the desired field. The (?:) syntax is a non-capturing group, which means it's just like regular parenthesis, but won't capture the value, so the only value captured is the value you want. (?:) has a risk of varying depending on your particular regex flavor. I don't know what language you're asking for, but I predominantly use Perl, so this regex should pretty much do it if you're using PCRE. If you're using something different, look into non-capturing groups.
Wow. That's a lot of talking about regexes. I need to shut up and post already.
Try this one:
/\/([\w\.]+)\/archive/
I am working on improving our glossary functionality in a custom CMS that is running with classic ASP (ASP 3.0) on IIS with VBScript code. I am stumped on a regex challenge I cannot solve.
Here is the current code:
If InStr(ART_ArticleBody, "href") = False then
sql="SELECT URL, Term, RegX FROM GLOSSARYDB;"
Set rsGlossary = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset")
rsGlossary.open sql, strSQLConn
Set RegExObject = New RegExp
While Not rsGlossary.EOF
URL = rsGlossary("URL")
Phrase = rsGlossary("RegX")
With RegExObject
.Pattern = Phrase
.IgnoreCase = true
.Global = false
End With
set expressionmatch = RegExObject.Execute(ART_ArticleBody)
if expressionmatch.count > 0 then
For Each expressionmatched in expressionmatch
RegExObject.Pattern = Phrase
URL = ""& expressionmatched.Value & ""
ART_ArticleBody = RegExObject.Replace(ART_ArticleBody, URL)
next
end if
rsGlossary.movenext
wend
rsGlossary.movefirst
Set RegExObject = nothing
end if
Instead of skipping putting glossary links in any article that has an href in it, as the above code does, I would like to change the code to process every article but have the RegEx pattern avoid matching on a glossary entry if the match is inside of an a tag.
For example, in italics below is a test example for this regex entry in my DB: ROI|return on investment|investment return
Here is a link that uses the glossary term: Info on return on investment.
Now, here is the glossary term in plain text, not inside of a link: return on investment.
We want to find the third instance of a match but not find the first two because they are both inside of a HTML link.
In the above text, if I were processing the article for the glossary entry "ROI|return on investment|investment return" I do not want to match on the first or second occurance that match because they are in an a tag. I need the regex pattern to skip over those matches and just match on any that are not inside of an a tag.
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.
Try this regex:
<a\b[^<>]*>[\s\S]*?</a>|(ROI|return on investment|investment return)
This matches an HTML anchor, or any of the terms you're looking for. The terms are captured into group number 1. So in your VBScript code, check if the first capturing group matched anything, and you've got one of your keywords outside an <a> tag.
This regex indeed won't work correctly if you have nested <a> tags. That shouldn't be a problem, as anchors are normally not nested inside each other. If it is a problem, you can't solve it with VBScript/JavaScript regular expressions. The regex also won't work correctly if you have <a> tags that are missing their closing tags. If you want to take that into account, try this regex:
<a\b[^<>]*>(?:(?:(?!<a\b)[\s\S])*?</a>)?|(ROI|return on investment|investment return)
This problem is, as they say, "non-trivial" in its current state. However, if you could modify your system to output more semantic markup, it would make things much easier:
undesired tag match
This is <span class="tag">a tag</span>
In this case, you can simply search:
(?<=<span class=\"tag\">)(phrase1|phrase2|phrase3)(?=</span>)
Or something a little more robust
(?<=<span class=\"tag\">).+?(?=</span>)
This way you can easily focus your searches to data within a specific <span>, and leave everything else aside.
You can't solve it because it can't be done, at least not with 100% reliability. HTML is not a "regular" language in the regular expression sense. Like the saying goes, when you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. There are some things regular expressions aren't good at. This is one of them.
Most languages have some form of HTML parsing library as standard or easily obtained. Use those. That's what they were designed for.
In general, you can't use a regular expression to recognize arbitrarily nested constructs (such as bracket-delimited HTML tags). If you had solved this problem, there's be a lot of mathematicians lining up to hear about it. :)
Having said that, .NET does indeed offer an extension to regular expressions that permits what I just said was impossible, and--even better!--the sample chapter for the great "Mastering Regular Expressions" available here happens to cover that feature.
(accounts receivable|A/R)(?!((?!</?a\b).)*</a)
(phrase1|phrase2|phrase3)(?!((?!</?a\b).)*</a)
The above approach seems to work, at least in my RegexBuddy software. I didn't figure it out on my own. Had some help from a guru. Time to test it in my ASP code. Thanks to all who provided input. I'm sure I didn't describe what I needed well enough for you to come up with the above solution. Mea culpa.