I have a string in the following format
----------some text-------------
How do I extract "some text" without the hyphens?
I have tried with this but it matches the whole string
(?<=-).*(?=-)
The pattern matches the whole line except the first and last hyphen due to the assertions on the left and right and the . also matches a hyphen.
You can keep using the assertions, and match any char except a hyphen using [^-]+ which is a negated character class.
(?<=-)[^-]+(?=-)
See a regex demo.
Note: if you also want to prevent matching a newline you can use (?<=-)[^-\r\n]+(?=-)
With your shown samples please try following regex.
^-+([^-]*)-+$
Online regex demo
Explanation: Matching all dashes from starting 1 or more occurrences then creating one and only capturing group which has everything matched till next - comes, then matching all dashes till last of value.
You are using Python, right? Then you do not need regex.
Use
s = "----------some text-------------"
print(s.strip("-"))
Results: some text.
See Python proof.
With regex, the same can be achieved using
re.sub(r'^-+|-+$', '', s)
See regex proof.
EXPLANATION
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
^ the beginning of the string
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-+ '-' (1 or more times (matching the most
amount possible))
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| OR
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-+ '-' (1 or more times (matching the most
amount possible))
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
$ before an optional \n, and the end of the
string
Related
I need to find mentions of compensations in emails. I am new to regex. Please see below the approach I am using.
sample_text = "Rate – $115k/yr. or $55/hr. - $60/hr"
My python code to find this,
impor re
PATTERN = r'((\$|\£) [0-9]*)|((\$|\£)[0-9]*)'
print(re.findall(PATTERN,sample_text))
The matches I am getting is
[('', '', '$115', '$'), ('', '', '$55', '$'), ('', '', '$60', '$')]
Expected match
["$115k/yr","$55/hr","$60/hr"]
Also the $ sign can be written as USD. How do I handle this in the same regex.
You can use
[$£]\d+[^.\s]*
[$£] Match either $ or £
\d+ Match 1+ digits
[^.\s]* Repeat 0+ times matching any char except . or a whitespace
Regex demo
import re
sample_text = "Rate – $115k/yr. or $55/hr. - $60/hr"
PATTERN = r'[$£]\d+[^.\s]*'
print(re.findall(PATTERN,sample_text))
Output
['$115k/yr', '$55/hr', '$60/hr']
If there must be a / present, you might also use
[$£]\d+[^\s/.]*/\w+
Regex demo
You can have something like:
[$£]\d+[^.]+
>>> PATTERN = '[$£]\d+[^.]+
>>> print(re.findall(PATTERN,sample_text))
['$115k/yr', '$55/hr', '$60/hr']
[$£] matches "$" or a "£"
\d+ matches one or more digits
[^.]+ matches everything that's not a "."
The parentheses in your regex cause the engine to report the contents of each parenthesized subexpression. You can use non-grouping parentheses (?:...) to avoid this, but of course, your expression can be rephrased to not have any parentheses at all:
PATTERN = r'[$£]\s*\d+'
Notice also how I changed the last quantifier to a + -- your attempt would also find isolated currency symbols with no numbers after them.
To point out the hopefully obvious, \s matches whitespace and \s* matches an arbitrary run of whitespace, including none at all; and \d matches a digit.
If you want to allow some text after the extracted match, add something like (?:/\w+)? to allow for a slash and one single word token as an optional expression after the main match. (Maybe adorn that with \s* on both sides of the slash, too.)
Need help with a regular expression to grab exactly n lines of text between two regex matches. For example, I need 17 lines of text and I used the example below, which does not work. I
Please see sample code below:
import re
match_string = re.search(r'^.*MDC_IDC_RAW_MARKER((.*?\r?\n){17})Stored_EGM_Trigger.*\n'), t, re.DOTALL).group()
value1 = re.search(r'value="(\d+)"', match_string).group(1)
value2 = re.search(r'value="(\d+\.\d+)"', match_string).group(1)
print(match_string)
print(value1)
print(value2)
I added a sample string to here, because SO does not allow long code string:
https://hastebin.com/aqowusijuc.xml
You are getting false positives because you are using the re.DOTALL flag, which allows the . character to match newline characters. That is, when you are matching ((.*?\r?\n){17}), the . could eat up many extra newline characters just to satisfy your required count of 17. You also now realize that the \r is superfluous. Also, starting your regex with ^.*? is superfluous because you are forcing the search to start from the beginning but then saying that the search engine should skip as many characters as necessary to find MDC_IDC_RAW_MARKER. So, a simplified and correct regex would be:
match_string = re.search(r'MDC_IDC_RAW_MARKER.*\n((.*\n){17})Stored_EGM_Trigger.*\n', t)
Regex Demo
I've been trying for about two hours now to write a regular expression which matches a single character that's not preceded or followed by the same character.
This is what I've got: (\d)(?<!\1)\1(?!\1); but it doesn't seem to work! (testing at https://regex101.com/r/whnj5M/6)
For example:
In 1111223 I would expect to match the 3 at the end, since it's not preceded or followed by another 3.
In 1151223 I would expect to match the 5 in the middle, and the 3 at the end for the same reasons as above.
The end goal for this is to be able to find pairs (and only pairs) of characters in strings (e.g. to find 11 in 112223 or 44 in 123544) and I was going to try and match single isolated characters, and then add a {2} to it to find pairs, but I can't even seem to get isolated characters to match!
Any help would be much appreciated, I thought I knew RegEx pretty well!
P.S. I'm testing in JS on regex101.com because it wouldn't let me use variable length lookbacks in Python on there, and I'm using the regex library to allow for this in my actual implementation.
Your regex is close, but by using simply (\d) you are consuming characters, which prevents the other match from occurring. Instead, you can use a positive lookahead to set the capture group and then test for any occurrences of the captured digit not being surrounded by copies of itself:
(?=.*?(.))(?<!\1)\1(?!\1)
By using a lookahead you avoid consuming any characters and so the regex can match anywhere in the string.
Note that in 1151223 this returns 5, 1 and 3 because the third 1 is not adjacent to any other 1s.
Demo on regex101 (requires JS that supports variable width lookbehinds)
The pattern you tried does not match because this part (\d)(?<!\1) can not match.
It reads as:
Capture a digit in group 1. Then, on the position after that captured
digit, assert what is captured should not be on the left.
You could make the pattern work by adding for example a dot after the backreference (?<!\1.) to assert that the value before what you have just matched is not the same as group 1
Pattern
(\d)(?<!\1.)\1(?!\1)
Regex demo | Python demo
Note that you have selected ECMAscript on regex101.
Python re does not support variable width lookbehind.
To make this work in Python, you need the PyPi regex module.
Example code
import regex
pattern = r"(\d)(?<!\1.)\1(?!\1)"
test_str = ("1111223\n"
"1151223\n\n"
"112223\n"
"123544")
matches = regex.finditer(pattern, test_str)
for matchNum, match in enumerate(matches, start=1):
print(match.group())
Output
22
11
22
11
44
#Theforthbird has provided a good explanation for why your regular explanation does not match the characters of interest.
Each character matched by the following regular expression is neither preceded nor followed by the same character (including characters at the beginning and end of the string).
r'^.$|^(.)(?!\1)|(?<=(.))(?!\2)(.)(?!\3)'
Demo
Python's re regex engine performs the following operations.
^.$ match the first char if it is the only char in the line
| or
^ match beginning of line
(.) match a char in capture group 1...
(?!\1) ...that is not followed by the same character
| or
(?<=(.)) save the previous char in capture group 2...
(?!\2) ...that is not equal to the next char
(.) match a character and save to capture group 3...
(?!\3) ...that is not equal to the following char
Suppose the string were "cat".
The internal string pointer is initially at the beginning of the line.
"c" is not at the end of the line so the first part of the alternation fails and the second part is considered.
"c" is matched and saved to capture group 1.
The negative lookahead asserting that "c" is not followed by the content of capture group 1 succeeds, so "c" is matched and the internal string pointer is advanced to a position between "c" and "a".
"a" fails the first two parts of the assertion so the third part is considered.
The positive lookbehind (?<=(.)) saves the preceding character ("c") in capture group 2.
The negative lookahead (?!\2), which asserts that the next character ("a") is not equal to the content of capture group 2, succeeds. The string pointer remains just before "a".
The next character ("a") is matched and saved in capture group 3.
The negative lookahead (?!\3), which asserts that the following character ("t") does not equal the content of capture group 3, succeeds, so "a" is matched and the string pointer advances to just before "t".
The same steps are performed when evaluating "t" as were performed when evaluating "a". Here the last token ((?!\3)) succeeds, however, because no characters follow "t".
I'm looking for a clean way to identify occurrences of [variableName] followed by the exact string .add(.
A variable name is a string which contains one or more characters from a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and an underscore.
One more thing is that it cannot start with any of the characters from 0-9, but I don't mind ignoring this condition because there are no such cases in the text that I need to parse anyway.
I've been following several tutorials, but the farthest I got was finding all occurrences of what I've referred to above as "variableName":
import re
txt = "The _rain() in+ Spain5"
x = re.split("[^a-zA-Z0-9_]+", txt)
print(x)
What is the right way to do it?
You may use
re.findall(r'\w+(?=\.add\()', txt, flags=re.ASCII)
The regex matches:
\w+ - 1+ word chars (due to re.ASCII, it only matches [A-Za-z0-9_] chars)
(?=\.add\() - a positive lookahead that matches a location immediately followed with .add( substring.
I have two scenarios to match . Length should be exactly 16.
Pattern should contain A-F,a-f,0-9 and '-' in 1st case.
AC-DE-48-23-45-67-AB-CD
ACDE48234567ABCD
I have tried with r'^([0-9A-Fa-f]{16})$|(([0-9A-Fa-f]{2}\-){7}[0-9A-Fa-f]{2})$'this , which is working fine . Looking for better expression .
You can simplify the regex by considering the string to be a group of two hex digits followed by an optional -, followed by 6 similar groups (i.e. if the first group had a -, the subsequent ones must too), followed by a group of 2 hex digits:
^[0-9A-Fa-f]{2}(-?)([0-9A-Fa-f]{2}\1){6}[0-9A-Fa-f]{2}$
Use of the re.I flag allows you to remove the a-f from the character classes:
^[0-9A-F]{2}(-?)([0-9A-F]{2}\1){6}[0-9A-F]{2}$
You can also simplify slightly further by replacing 0-9 by \d in the character classes (although personally I find 0-9 easier to read):
^[\dA-F]{2}(-?)([\dA-F]{2}\1){6}[\dA-F]{2}$
Demo on regex101
Sample python code:
import re
strs = ['AC-DE-48-23-45-67-AB-CD',
'ACDE48234567ABCD',
'AC-DE48-23-45-67-AB-CD',
'ACDE48234567ABC',
'ACDE48234567ABCDE']
for s in strs:
print(s + (' matched' if re.match(r'^[0-9A-F]{2}(-?)([0-9A-F]{2}\1){6}[0-9A-F]{2}$', s, re.I) else ' didn\'t match'))
Output
AC-DE-48-23-45-67-AB-CD matched
ACDE48234567ABCD matched
AC-DE48-23-45-67-AB-CD didn't match
ACDE48234567ABC didn't match
ACDE48234567ABCDE didn't match