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)
)
)
))
)
I made a regex which inserts a space where ever there is any of the characters
-:\*_/;, present for example JET*AIRWAYS\INDIA/858701/IDBI 05/05/05;05:05:05 a/c should beJET* AIRWAYS\ INDIA/ 858701/ IDBI 05/05/05; 05:05:05 a/c
The regex I used is (?!a\/c|w\/d|m\/s|s\/w|m\/o)(\D-|\D:|\D\*|\D_|\D\\|\D\/|\D\;)
I have added some words exceptions like a/c w/d etc. \D conditions given to avoid date/time values getting separated, but this created an issue, the numbers followed by the above mentioned characters never get split.
My requirement is
1. Insert a space after characters -:\*_/;,
2. but date and time should not get split which may have / :
3. need exception on words like a/c w/d
The following is the full code
Private Function formatColon(oldString As String) As String
Dim reg As New RegExp: reg.Global = True: reg.Pattern = "(?!a\/c|w\/d|m\/s|s\/w|m\/o)(\D-|\D:|\D\*|\D_|\D\\|\D\/|\D\;)" '"(\D:|\D/|\D-|^w/d)"
Dim newString As String: newString = reg.Replace(oldString, "$1 ")
formatColon = XtraspaceKill(newString)
End Function
I would use 3 replacements.
Replace all date and time special characters with a special macro that should never be found in your text, e.g. for 05/15/2018 4:06 PM, something based on your name:
05MANUMOHANSLASH15MANUMOHANSLASH2018 4MANUMOHANCOLON06 PM
You can encode exceptions too, like this:
aMANUMOHANSLASHc
Now run your original regex to replace all special characters.
Finally, unreplace the macros MANUMOHANSLASH and MANUMOHANCOLON.
Meanwhile, let me tell you why this is complicated in a single regex.
If trying to do this in a single regex, you have to ask, for each / or :, "Am I a part of a date or time?"
To answer that, you need to use lookahead and lookbehind assertions, the latter of which Microsoft has finally added support for.
But given a /, you don't know if you're between the first and second, or second and third parts of the date. Similar for time.
The number of cases you need to consider will render your regex unmaintainably complex.
So please just use a few separate replacements :-)
I'm using PIG to generate a list of URLs that have been recently visited. In each of the URLs, there is a string of numbers that represents the product page visited. I'm trying to use a regex_extract_all() function to extract just the string of numbers, which vary in length from 6-8. The string of digits can be found directly after jobs2/view/ and usually ends with +&cd but sometimes they may end with ).
Here are a few example URLs:
(http://a.com/search?q=cache:QD7vZRHkPQoJ:ca.xyz.com/jobs2/view/17069404+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca)
(http://a.com/search?q=cache:G9323j2oNbAJ:ca.xyz.com/jobs2/view/5977065+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca)
(http://a.com/search?q=cache:aNspmG11qAJ:hk.xyz.com/jobs2/view/16988928+&cd=2&hl=zh-TW&ct=clnk&gl=hk)
(http://a.com/search?q=cache:aNspmG11AJ:hk.xyz.com/jobs2/view/16988928+&cd=2&hl=zh-TW&ct=clnk&gl=hk)
(http://a.com/search?q=cache:aNspmG11qAJ:hk.xyz.com/jobs2/view/16988928+&cd=2&hl=zh-TW&ct=cl k&gl=hk)
Here is the current regex I am using:
J = FOREACH jpage GENERATE FLATTEN(REGEX_EXTRACT_ALL(TEXTCOLUMN, '\/view\/(\d+)\+\&')) as (output:chararray)
I have also tried other forms such as:
'[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]', 'view.([0-9]+)', 'view\/([\d]+)\+',
'[0-9][0-9][0-9]+', and
'[0-9][0-9][0-9]*'; none of which work.
Can anybody assist here or have another way of going about it?
Much appreciated,
MM
Reason for"Unexpected character 'D'" is, you need to put double backslash instead of single backslash. eg just replace [\d+] to [\\d+]
Here your solution, please validate all your inputs strings
input.txt
http://a.com/search?q=cache:QD7vZRHkPQoJ:ca.xyz.com/jobs2/view/17069404+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca
http://a.com/search?q=cache:G9323j2oNbAJ:ca.xyz.com/jobs2/view/5977065+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca
http://a.com/search?q=cache:aNspmG11qAJ:hk.xyz.com/jobs2/view/16988928+&cd=2&hl=zh-TW&ct=clnk&gl=hk
http://a.com/search?q=cache:aNspmG11AJ:hk.xyz.com/jobs2/view/16988928+&cd=2&hl=zh-TW&ct=clnk&gl=hk
http://a.com/search?q=cache:aNspmG11qAJ:hk.xyz.com/jobs2/view/16988928+&cd=2&hl=zh-TW&ct=clk&gl=hk
http://a.com/search?q=cache:aNspmG11qAJ:hk.xyz.com/jobs2/view/16988928)=2&hl=zh-TW&ct=clk&gl=hk
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://my.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/9919248
Updated Pigscript:
A = LOAD 'input.txt' as line;
B = FOREACH A GENERATE REGEX_EXTRACT(line,'.*/view/(\\d+)([+|&|cd|)?]+)?',1);
dump B;
(17069404)
(5977065)
(16988928)
(16988928)
(16988928)
(16988928)
I'm not familiar with PIG, but this regex will match your target:
(?<=/jobs2/view/)\d+
By using a (non-consuming) look behind, the entire match (not just a group of the match) is your number.
I have a list of label names in a text file I'd like to manipulate using Find and Replace in Notepad++, they are listed as follows:
MyLabel_01
MyLabel_02
MyLabel_03
MyLabel_04
MyLabel_05
MyLabel_06
I want to rename them in Notepad++ to the following:
Label_A_One
Label_A_Two
Label_A_Three
Label_B_One
Label_B_Two
Label_B_Three
The Regex I'm using in the Notepad++'s replace dialog to capture the label name is the following:
((MyLabel_0)((1)|(2)|(3)|(4)|(5)|(6)))
I want to replace each capture group as follows:
\1 = Label_
\2 = A_One
\3 = A_Two
\4 = A_Three
\5 = B_One
\6 = B_Two
\7 = B_Three
My problem is that Notepad++ doesn't register the syntax of the regex above. When I hit Count in the Replace Dialog, it returns with 0 occurrences. Not sure what's misesing in the syntax. And yes I made sure the Regular Expression radio button is selected. Help is appreciated.
UPDATE:
Tried escaping the parenthesis, still didn't work:
\(\(MyLabel_0\)\((1\)|\(2\)|\(3\)|\(4\)|\(5\)|\(6\)\)\)
Ed's response has shown a working pattern since alternation isn't supported in Notepad++, however the rest of your problem can't be handled by regex alone. What you're trying to do isn't possible with a regex find/replace approach. Your desired result involves logical conditions which can't be expressed in regex. All you can do with the replace method is re-arrange items and refer to the captured items, but you can't tell it to use "A" for values 1-3, and "B" for 4-6. Furthermore, you can't assign placeholders like that. They are really capture groups that you are backreferencing.
To reach the results you've shown you would need to write a small program that would allow you to check the captured values and perform the appropriate replacements.
EDIT: here's an example of how to achieve this in C#
var numToWordMap = new Dictionary<int, string>();
numToWordMap[1] = "A_One";
numToWordMap[2] = "A_Two";
numToWordMap[3] = "A_Three";
numToWordMap[4] = "B_One";
numToWordMap[5] = "B_Two";
numToWordMap[6] = "B_Three";
string pattern = #"\bMyLabel_(\d+)\b";
string filePath = #"C:\temp.txt";
string[] contents = File.ReadAllLines(filePath);
for (int i = 0; i < contents.Length; i++)
{
contents[i] = Regex.Replace(contents[i], pattern,
m =>
{
int num = int.Parse(m.Groups[1].Value);
if (numToWordMap.ContainsKey(num))
{
return "Label_" + numToWordMap[num];
}
// key not found, use original value
return m.Value;
});
}
File.WriteAllLines(filePath, contents);
You should be able to use this easily. Perhaps you can download LINQPad or Visual C# Express to do so.
If your files are too large this might be an inefficient approach, in which case you could use a StreamReader and StreamWriter to read from the original file and write it to another, respectively.
Also be aware that my sample code writes back to the original file. For testing purposes you can change that path to another file so it isn't overwritten.
Bar bar bar - Notepad++ thinks you're a barbarian.
(obsolete - see update below.) No vertical bars in Notepad++ regex - sorry. I forget every few months, too!
Use [123456] instead.
Update: Sorry, I didn't read carefully enough; on top of the barhopping problem, #Ahmad's spot-on - you can't do a mapping replacement like that.
Update: Version 6 of Notepad++ changed the regular expression engine to a Perl-compatible one, which supports "|". AFAICT, if you have a version 5., auto-update won't update to 6. - you have to explicitly download it.
A regular expression search and replace for
MyLabel_((01)|(02)|(03)|(04)|(05)|(06))
with
Label_(?2A_One)(?3A_Two)(?4A_Three)(?5B_One)(?6B_Two)(?7B_Three)
works on Notepad 6.3.2
The outermost pair of brackets is for grouping, they limit the scope of the first alternation; not sure whether they could be omitted but including them makes the scope clear. The pattern searches for a fixed string followed by one of the two-digit pairs. (The leading zero could be factored out and placed in the fixed string.) Each digit pair is wrapped in round brackets so it is captured.
In the replacement expression, the clause (?4A_Three) says that if capture group 4 matched something then insert the text A_Three, otherwise insert nothing. Similarly for the other clauses. As the 6 alternatives are mutually exclusive only one will match. Thus only one of the (?...) clauses will have matched and so only one will insert text.
The easiest way to do this that I would recommend is to use AWK. If you're on Windows, look for the mingw32 precompiled binaries out there for free download (it'll be called gawk).
BEGIN {
FS = "_0";
a[1]="A_One";
a[2]="A_Two";
a[3]="A_Three";
a[4]="B_One";
a[5]="B_Two";
a[6]="B_Three";
}
{
printf("Label_%s\n", a[$2]);
}
Execute on Windows as follows:
C:\Users\Mydir>gawk -f test.awk awk.in
Label_A_One
Label_A_Two
Label_A_Three
Label_B_One
Label_B_Two
Label_B_Three
I had this question a couple of times before, and I still couldn't find a good answer..
In my current problem, I have a console program output (string) that looks like this:
Number of assemblies processed = 1200
Number of assemblies uninstalled = 1197
Number of failures = 3
Now I want to extract those numbers and to check if there were failures. (That's a gacutil.exe output, btw.) In other words, I want to match any number [0-9]+ in the string that is preceded by 'failures = '.
How would I do that? I want to get the number only. Of course I can match the whole thing like /failures = [0-9]+/ .. and then trim the first characters with length("failures = ") or something like that. The point is, I don't want to do that, it's a lame workaround.
Because it's odd; if my pattern-to-match-but-not-into-output ("failures = ") comes after the thing i want to extract ([0-9]+), there is a way to do it:
pattern(?=expression)
To show the absurdity of this, if the whole file was processed backwards, I could use:
[0-9]+(?= = seruliaf)
... so, is there no forward-way? :T
pattern(?=expression) is a regex positive lookahead and what you are looking for is a regex positive lookbehind that goes like this (?<=expression)pattern but this feature is not supported by all flavors of regex. It depends which language you are using.
more infos at regular-expressions.info for comparison of Lookaround feature scroll down 2/3 on this page.
If your console output does actually look like that throughout, try splitting the string on "=" when the word "failure" is found, then get the last element (or the 2nd element). You did not say what your language is, but any decent language with string splitting capability would do the job. For example
gacutil.exe.... | ruby -F"=" -ane "print $F[-1] if /failure/"