Parsing wide spanning HTML table with regex [duplicate] - html

This question's answers are a community effort. Edit existing answers to improve this post. It is not currently accepting new answers or interactions.
What is this?
This is a collection of common Q&A. This is also a Community Wiki, so everyone is invited to participate in maintaining it.
Why is this?
regex is suffering from give me ze code type of questions and poor answers with no explanation. This reference is meant to provide links to quality Q&A.
What's the scope?
This reference is meant for the following languages: php, perl, javascript, python, ruby, java, .net.
This might be too broad, but these languages share the same syntax. For specific features there's the tag of the language behind it, example:
What are regular expression Balancing Groups? .net

The Stack Overflow Regular Expressions FAQ
See also a lot of general hints and useful links at the regex tag details page.
Online tutorials
RegexOne ↪
Regular Expressions Info ↪
Quantifiers
Zero-or-more: *:greedy, *?:reluctant, *+:possessive
One-or-more: +:greedy, +?:reluctant, ++:possessive
?:optional (zero-or-one)
Min/max ranges (all inclusive): {n,m}:between n & m, {n,}:n-or-more, {n}:exactly n
Differences between greedy, reluctant (a.k.a. "lazy", "ungreedy") and possessive quantifier:
Greedy vs. Reluctant vs. Possessive Quantifiers
In-depth discussion on the differences between greedy versus non-greedy
What's the difference between {n} and {n}?
Can someone explain Possessive Quantifiers to me? php, perl, java, ruby
Emulating possessive quantifiers .net
Non-Stack Overflow references: From Oracle, regular-expressions.info
Character Classes
What is the difference between square brackets and parentheses?
[...]: any one character, [^...]: negated/any character but
[^] matches any one character including newlines javascript
[\w-[\d]] / [a-z-[qz]]: set subtraction .net, xml-schema, xpath, JGSoft
[\w&&[^\d]]: set intersection java, ruby 1.9+
[[:alpha:]]:POSIX character classes
[[:<:]] and [[:>:]] Word boundaries
Why do [^\\D2], [^[^0-9]2], [^2[^0-9]] get different results in Java? java
Shorthand:
Digit: \d:digit, \D:non-digit
Word character (Letter, digit, underscore): \w:word character, \W:non-word character
Whitespace: \s:whitespace, \S:non-whitespace
Unicode categories (\p{L}, \P{L}, etc.)
Escape Sequences
Horizontal whitespace: \h:space-or-tab, \t:tab
Newlines:
\r, \n:carriage return and line feed
\R:generic newline php java-8
Negated whitespace sequences: \H:Non horizontal whitespace character, \V:Non vertical whitespace character, \N:Non line feed character pcre php5 java-8
Other: \v:vertical tab, \e:the escape character
Anchors
anchor
matches
flavors
^
Start of string
Common*
^
Start of line
Commonm
$
End of line
Commonm
$
End of text
Common* except javascript
$
Very end of string
javascript*, phpD
\A
Start of string
Common except javascript
\Z
End of text
Common except javascript python
\Z
Very end of string
python
\z
Very end of string
Common except javascript python
\b
Word boundary
Common
\B
Not a word boundary
Common
\G
End of previous match
Common except javascript, python
Term
Definition
Start of string
At the very start of the string.
Start of line
At the very start of the string, andafter a non-terminal line terminator.
Very end of string
At the very end of the string.
End of text
At the very end of the string, andat a terminal line terminator.
End of line
At the very end of the string, andat a line terminator.
Word boundary
At a word character not preceded by a word character, andat a non-word character not preceded by a non-word character.
End of previous match
At a previously set position, usually where a previous match ended.At the very start of the string if no position was set.
"Common" refers to the following: icu java javascript .net objective-c pcre perl php python swift ruby
* Default |
m Multi-line mode. |
D Dollar end only mode.
Groups
(...):capture group, (?:):non-capture group
Why is my repeating capturing group only capturing the last match?
\1:backreference and capture-group reference, $1:capture group reference
What's the meaning of a number after a backslash in a regular expression?
\g<1>123:How to follow a numbered capture group, such as \1, with a number?: python
What does a subpattern (?i:regex) mean?
What does the 'P' in (?P<group_name>regexp) mean?
(?>):atomic group or independent group, (?|):branch reset
Equivalent of branch reset in .NET/C# .net
Named capture groups:
General named capturing group reference at regular-expressions.info
java: (?<groupname>regex): Overview and naming rules (Non-Stack Overflow links)
Other languages: (?P<groupname>regex) python, (?<groupname>regex) .net, (?<groupname>regex) perl, (?P<groupname>regex) and (?<groupname>regex) php
Lookarounds
Lookaheads: (?=...):positive, (?!...):negative
Lookbehinds: (?<=...):positive, (?<!...):negative
Lookbehind limits in:
Lookbehinds need to be constant-length php, perl, python, ruby
Lookarounds of limited length {0,n} java
Variable length lookbehinds are allowed .net
Lookbehind alternatives:
Using \K php, perl (Flavors that support \K)
Alternative regex module for Python python
The hacky way
JavaScript negative lookbehind equivalents External link
Modifiers
flag
modifier
flavors
a
ASCII
python
c
current position
perl
e
expression
php perl
g
global
most
i
case-insensitive
most
m
multiline
php perl python javascript .net java
m
(non)multiline
ruby
o
once
perl ruby
r
non-destructive
perl
S
study
php
s
single line
ruby
U
ungreedy
php r
u
unicode
most
x
whitespace-extended
most
y
sticky ↪
javascript
How to convert preg_replace e to preg_replace_callback?
What are inline modifiers?
What is '?-mix' in a Ruby Regular Expression
Other:
|:alternation (OR) operator, .:any character, [.]:literal dot character
What special characters must be escaped?
Control verbs (php and perl): (*PRUNE), (*SKIP), (*FAIL) and (*F)
php only: (*BSR_ANYCRLF)
Recursion (php and perl): (?R), (?0) and (?1), (?-1), (?&groupname)
Common Tasks
Get a string between two curly braces: {...}
Match (or replace) a pattern except in situations s1, s2, s3...
How do I find all YouTube video ids in a string using a regex?
Validation:
Internet: email addresses, URLs (host/port: regex and non-regex alternatives), passwords
Numeric: a number, min-max ranges (such as 1-31), phone numbers, date
Parsing HTML with regex: See "General Information > When not to use Regex"
Advanced Regex-Fu
Strings and numbers:
Regular expression to match a line that doesn't contain a word
How does this PCRE pattern detect palindromes?
Match strings whose length is a fourth power
How does this regex find triangular numbers?
How to determine if a number is a prime with regex?
How to match the middle character in a string with regex?
Other:
How can we match a^n b^n?
Match nested brackets
Using a recursive pattern php, perl
Using balancing groups .net
“Vertical” regex matching in an ASCII “image”
List of highly up-voted regex questions on Code Golf
How to make two quantifiers repeat the same number of times?
An impossible-to-match regular expression: (?!a)a
Match/delete/replace this except in contexts A, B and C
Match nested brackets with regex without using recursion or balancing groups?
Flavor-Specific Information
(Except for those marked with *, this section contains non-Stack Overflow links.)
Java
Official documentation: Pattern Javadoc ↪, Oracle's regular expressions tutorial ↪
The differences between functions in java.util.regex.Matcher:
matches()): The match must be anchored to both input-start and -end
find()): A match may be anywhere in the input string (substrings)
lookingAt(): The match must be anchored to input-start only
(For anchors in general, see the section "Anchors")
The only java.lang.String functions that accept regular expressions: matches(s), replaceAll(s,s), replaceFirst(s,s), split(s), split(s,i)
*An (opinionated and) detailed discussion of the disadvantages of and missing features in java.util.regex
.NET
How to read a .NET regex with look-ahead, look-behind, capturing groups and back-references mixed together?
Official documentation:
Boost regex engine: General syntax, Perl syntax (used by TextPad, Sublime Text, UltraEdit, ...???)
JavaScript general info and RegExp object
.NET MySQL Oracle Perl5 version 18.2
PHP: pattern syntax, preg_match
Python: Regular expression operations, search vs match, how-to
Rust: crate regex, struct regex::Regex
Splunk: regex terminology and syntax and regex command
Tcl: regex syntax, manpage, regexp command
Visual Studio Find and Replace
General information
(Links marked with * are non-Stack Overflow links.)
Other general documentation resources: Learning Regular Expressions, *Regular-expressions.info, *Wikipedia entry, *RexEgg, Open-Directory Project
DFA versus NFA
Generating Strings matching regex
Books: Jeffrey Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions
When to not use regular expressions:
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems. (blog post written by Stack Overflow's founder)*
Do not use regex to parse HTML:
Don't. Please, just don't
Well, maybe...if you're really determined (other answers in this question are also good)
Examples of regex that can cause regex engine to fail
Why does this regular expression kill the Java regex engine?
Tools: Testers and Explainers
(This section contains non-Stack Overflow links.)
Online (* includes replacement tester, + includes split tester):
Debuggex (Also has a repository of useful regexes) javascript, python, pcre
*Regular Expressions 101 php, pcre, python, javascript, java
Regex Pal, regular-expressions.info javascript
Rubular ruby RegExr Regex Hero dotnet
*+ regexstorm.net .net
*RegexPlanet: Java java, Go go, Haskell haskell, JavaScript javascript, .NET dotnet, Perl perl php PCRE php, Python python, Ruby ruby, XRegExp xregexp
freeformatter.com xregexp
*+regex.larsolavtorvik.com php PCRE and POSIX, javascript
Offline:
Microsoft Windows: RegexBuddy (analysis), RegexMagic (creation), Expresso (analysis, creation, free)
MySQL 8.0: Various syntax changes were made. Note especially the doubling of backslashes in some contexts. (This Answer need further editing to reflect the differences.)

Related

MySQL 8.0.30 Regular Expression Word Matching with Special Characters

While there's a told of "old" examples on the internet using the now unsupported '[[:<:]]word[[:>:]]' technique, I'm trying to find out how, in MySQL 8.0.30, to do exact word matching from our table with words that have special characters in them.
For example, we have a paragraph of text like:
"Senior software engineer and C++ developer with Unit Test and JavaScript experience. I also have .NET experience!"
We have a table of keywords to match against this and have been using the basic system of:
SELECT
sk.ID
FROM
sit_keyword sk
WHERE
var_text REGEXP CONCAT('\\b',sk.keyword,'\\b')
It works fine 90% of the time, but it completely fails on:
C#, C++, .NET, A+ or "A +" etc. So it's failing to match keywords with special characters in them.
I can't seem to find any recent documentation on how to address this since, as mentioned, nearly all of the examples I can find use the old unsupported techniques. Note I need to match these words (with special characters) anywhere in the source text, so it can be the first or last word, or somewhere in the middle.
Any advice on the best way to do this using REGEXP would be appreciated.
You need to escape special chars in the search phrase and use the construct that I call "adaptive dynamic word boundaries" instead of word boundaries:
var_text REGEXP CONCAT('(?!\\B\\w)',REGEXP_REPLACE(sk.keyword, '([-.^$*+?()\\[\\]{}\\\\|])', '\\$1'),'(?<!\\w\\B)')
The REGEXP_REPLACE(sk.keyword, '([-.^$*+?()\\[\\]{}\\\\|])', '\\$1') matches . ^ $ * + - ? ( ) [ ] { } \ | chars (adds a \ before them) and (?!\\B\\w) / (?<!\\w\\B) require word boundaries only when the search phrase start/ends with a word char.
More details on adaptive dynamic word boundaries and demo in my YT video.
Regular expressions treat several characters as metacharacters. These are documented in the manual on regular expression syntax: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/regexp.html#regexp-syntax
If you need a metacharacter to be treated as the literal character, you need to escape it with a backslash.
This gets very complex. If you just want to search for substrings, perhaps you should just use LOCATE():
WHERE LOCATE(sk.keyword, var_text) > 0
This avoids all the trickery with metacharacters. It treats the string of sk.keyword as containing only literal characters.

limit year in a number pattern with regex in HTML5 [duplicate]

This question's answers are a community effort. Edit existing answers to improve this post. It is not currently accepting new answers or interactions.
What is this?
This is a collection of common Q&A. This is also a Community Wiki, so everyone is invited to participate in maintaining it.
Why is this?
regex is suffering from give me ze code type of questions and poor answers with no explanation. This reference is meant to provide links to quality Q&A.
What's the scope?
This reference is meant for the following languages: php, perl, javascript, python, ruby, java, .net.
This might be too broad, but these languages share the same syntax. For specific features there's the tag of the language behind it, example:
What are regular expression Balancing Groups? .net
The Stack Overflow Regular Expressions FAQ
See also a lot of general hints and useful links at the regex tag details page.
Online tutorials
RegexOne ↪
Regular Expressions Info ↪
Quantifiers
Zero-or-more: *:greedy, *?:reluctant, *+:possessive
One-or-more: +:greedy, +?:reluctant, ++:possessive
?:optional (zero-or-one)
Min/max ranges (all inclusive): {n,m}:between n & m, {n,}:n-or-more, {n}:exactly n
Differences between greedy, reluctant (a.k.a. "lazy", "ungreedy") and possessive quantifier:
Greedy vs. Reluctant vs. Possessive Quantifiers
In-depth discussion on the differences between greedy versus non-greedy
What's the difference between {n} and {n}?
Can someone explain Possessive Quantifiers to me? php, perl, java, ruby
Emulating possessive quantifiers .net
Non-Stack Overflow references: From Oracle, regular-expressions.info
Character Classes
What is the difference between square brackets and parentheses?
[...]: any one character, [^...]: negated/any character but
[^] matches any one character including newlines javascript
[\w-[\d]] / [a-z-[qz]]: set subtraction .net, xml-schema, xpath, JGSoft
[\w&&[^\d]]: set intersection java, ruby 1.9+
[[:alpha:]]:POSIX character classes
[[:<:]] and [[:>:]] Word boundaries
Why do [^\\D2], [^[^0-9]2], [^2[^0-9]] get different results in Java? java
Shorthand:
Digit: \d:digit, \D:non-digit
Word character (Letter, digit, underscore): \w:word character, \W:non-word character
Whitespace: \s:whitespace, \S:non-whitespace
Unicode categories (\p{L}, \P{L}, etc.)
Escape Sequences
Horizontal whitespace: \h:space-or-tab, \t:tab
Newlines:
\r, \n:carriage return and line feed
\R:generic newline php java-8
Negated whitespace sequences: \H:Non horizontal whitespace character, \V:Non vertical whitespace character, \N:Non line feed character pcre php5 java-8
Other: \v:vertical tab, \e:the escape character
Anchors
anchor
matches
flavors
^
Start of string
Common*
^
Start of line
Commonm
$
End of line
Commonm
$
End of text
Common* except javascript
$
Very end of string
javascript*, phpD
\A
Start of string
Common except javascript
\Z
End of text
Common except javascript python
\Z
Very end of string
python
\z
Very end of string
Common except javascript python
\b
Word boundary
Common
\B
Not a word boundary
Common
\G
End of previous match
Common except javascript, python
Term
Definition
Start of string
At the very start of the string.
Start of line
At the very start of the string, andafter a non-terminal line terminator.
Very end of string
At the very end of the string.
End of text
At the very end of the string, andat a terminal line terminator.
End of line
At the very end of the string, andat a line terminator.
Word boundary
At a word character not preceded by a word character, andat a non-word character not preceded by a non-word character.
End of previous match
At a previously set position, usually where a previous match ended.At the very start of the string if no position was set.
"Common" refers to the following: icu java javascript .net objective-c pcre perl php python swift ruby
* Default |
m Multi-line mode. |
D Dollar end only mode.
Groups
(...):capture group, (?:):non-capture group
Why is my repeating capturing group only capturing the last match?
\1:backreference and capture-group reference, $1:capture group reference
What's the meaning of a number after a backslash in a regular expression?
\g<1>123:How to follow a numbered capture group, such as \1, with a number?: python
What does a subpattern (?i:regex) mean?
What does the 'P' in (?P<group_name>regexp) mean?
(?>):atomic group or independent group, (?|):branch reset
Equivalent of branch reset in .NET/C# .net
Named capture groups:
General named capturing group reference at regular-expressions.info
java: (?<groupname>regex): Overview and naming rules (Non-Stack Overflow links)
Other languages: (?P<groupname>regex) python, (?<groupname>regex) .net, (?<groupname>regex) perl, (?P<groupname>regex) and (?<groupname>regex) php
Lookarounds
Lookaheads: (?=...):positive, (?!...):negative
Lookbehinds: (?<=...):positive, (?<!...):negative
Lookbehind limits in:
Lookbehinds need to be constant-length php, perl, python, ruby
Lookarounds of limited length {0,n} java
Variable length lookbehinds are allowed .net
Lookbehind alternatives:
Using \K php, perl (Flavors that support \K)
Alternative regex module for Python python
The hacky way
JavaScript negative lookbehind equivalents External link
Modifiers
flag
modifier
flavors
a
ASCII
python
c
current position
perl
e
expression
php perl
g
global
most
i
case-insensitive
most
m
multiline
php perl python javascript .net java
m
(non)multiline
ruby
o
once
perl ruby
r
non-destructive
perl
S
study
php
s
single line
ruby
U
ungreedy
php r
u
unicode
most
x
whitespace-extended
most
y
sticky ↪
javascript
How to convert preg_replace e to preg_replace_callback?
What are inline modifiers?
What is '?-mix' in a Ruby Regular Expression
Other:
|:alternation (OR) operator, .:any character, [.]:literal dot character
What special characters must be escaped?
Control verbs (php and perl): (*PRUNE), (*SKIP), (*FAIL) and (*F)
php only: (*BSR_ANYCRLF)
Recursion (php and perl): (?R), (?0) and (?1), (?-1), (?&groupname)
Common Tasks
Get a string between two curly braces: {...}
Match (or replace) a pattern except in situations s1, s2, s3...
How do I find all YouTube video ids in a string using a regex?
Validation:
Internet: email addresses, URLs (host/port: regex and non-regex alternatives), passwords
Numeric: a number, min-max ranges (such as 1-31), phone numbers, date
Parsing HTML with regex: See "General Information > When not to use Regex"
Advanced Regex-Fu
Strings and numbers:
Regular expression to match a line that doesn't contain a word
How does this PCRE pattern detect palindromes?
Match strings whose length is a fourth power
How does this regex find triangular numbers?
How to determine if a number is a prime with regex?
How to match the middle character in a string with regex?
Other:
How can we match a^n b^n?
Match nested brackets
Using a recursive pattern php, perl
Using balancing groups .net
“Vertical” regex matching in an ASCII “image”
List of highly up-voted regex questions on Code Golf
How to make two quantifiers repeat the same number of times?
An impossible-to-match regular expression: (?!a)a
Match/delete/replace this except in contexts A, B and C
Match nested brackets with regex without using recursion or balancing groups?
Flavor-Specific Information
(Except for those marked with *, this section contains non-Stack Overflow links.)
Java
Official documentation: Pattern Javadoc ↪, Oracle's regular expressions tutorial ↪
The differences between functions in java.util.regex.Matcher:
matches()): The match must be anchored to both input-start and -end
find()): A match may be anywhere in the input string (substrings)
lookingAt(): The match must be anchored to input-start only
(For anchors in general, see the section "Anchors")
The only java.lang.String functions that accept regular expressions: matches(s), replaceAll(s,s), replaceFirst(s,s), split(s), split(s,i)
*An (opinionated and) detailed discussion of the disadvantages of and missing features in java.util.regex
.NET
How to read a .NET regex with look-ahead, look-behind, capturing groups and back-references mixed together?
Official documentation:
Boost regex engine: General syntax, Perl syntax (used by TextPad, Sublime Text, UltraEdit, ...???)
JavaScript general info and RegExp object
.NET MySQL Oracle Perl5 version 18.2
PHP: pattern syntax, preg_match
Python: Regular expression operations, search vs match, how-to
Rust: crate regex, struct regex::Regex
Splunk: regex terminology and syntax and regex command
Tcl: regex syntax, manpage, regexp command
Visual Studio Find and Replace
General information
(Links marked with * are non-Stack Overflow links.)
Other general documentation resources: Learning Regular Expressions, *Regular-expressions.info, *Wikipedia entry, *RexEgg, Open-Directory Project
DFA versus NFA
Generating Strings matching regex
Books: Jeffrey Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions
When to not use regular expressions:
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems. (blog post written by Stack Overflow's founder)*
Do not use regex to parse HTML:
Don't. Please, just don't
Well, maybe...if you're really determined (other answers in this question are also good)
Examples of regex that can cause regex engine to fail
Why does this regular expression kill the Java regex engine?
Tools: Testers and Explainers
(This section contains non-Stack Overflow links.)
Online (* includes replacement tester, + includes split tester):
Debuggex (Also has a repository of useful regexes) javascript, python, pcre
*Regular Expressions 101 php, pcre, python, javascript, java
Regex Pal, regular-expressions.info javascript
Rubular ruby RegExr Regex Hero dotnet
*+ regexstorm.net .net
*RegexPlanet: Java java, Go go, Haskell haskell, JavaScript javascript, .NET dotnet, Perl perl php PCRE php, Python python, Ruby ruby, XRegExp xregexp
freeformatter.com xregexp
*+regex.larsolavtorvik.com php PCRE and POSIX, javascript
Offline:
Microsoft Windows: RegexBuddy (analysis), RegexMagic (creation), Expresso (analysis, creation, free)
MySQL 8.0: Various syntax changes were made. Note especially the doubling of backslashes in some contexts. (This Answer need further editing to reflect the differences.)

When use parameters in JSON POST data in Jmeter, another json entity is changed [duplicate]

I am tired of always trying to guess, if I should escape special characters like '()[]{}|' etc. when using many implementations of regexps.
It is different with, for example, Python, sed, grep, awk, Perl, rename, Apache, find and so on.
Is there any rule set which tells when I should, and when I should not, escape special characters? Does it depend on the regexp type, like PCRE, POSIX or extended regexps?
Which characters you must and which you mustn't escape indeed depends on the regex flavor you're working with.
For PCRE, and most other so-called Perl-compatible flavors, escape these outside character classes:
.^$*+?()[{\|
and these inside character classes:
^-]\
For POSIX extended regexes (ERE), escape these outside character classes (same as PCRE):
.^$*+?()[{\|
Escaping any other characters is an error with POSIX ERE.
Inside character classes, the backslash is a literal character in POSIX regular expressions. You cannot use it to escape anything. You have to use "clever placement" if you want to include character class metacharacters as literals. Put the ^ anywhere except at the start, the ] at the start, and the - at the start or the end of the character class to match these literally, e.g.:
[]^-]
In POSIX basic regular expressions (BRE), these are metacharacters that you need to escape to suppress their meaning:
.^$*[\
Escaping parentheses and curly brackets in BREs gives them the special meaning their unescaped versions have in EREs. Some implementations (e.g. GNU) also give special meaning to other characters when escaped, such as \? and +. Escaping a character other than .^$*(){} is normally an error with BREs.
Inside character classes, BREs follow the same rule as EREs.
If all this makes your head spin, grab a copy of RegexBuddy. On the Create tab, click Insert Token, and then Literal. RegexBuddy will add escapes as needed.
Modern RegEx Flavors (PCRE)
Includes C, C++, Delphi, EditPad, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP (preg), PostgreSQL, PowerGREP, PowerShell, Python, REALbasic, Real Studio, Ruby, TCL, VB.Net, VBScript, wxWidgets, XML Schema, Xojo, XRegExp.PCRE compatibility may vary
    Anywhere: . ^ $ * + - ? ( ) [ ] { } \ |
Legacy RegEx Flavors (BRE/ERE)
Includes awk, ed, egrep, emacs, GNUlib, grep, PHP (ereg), MySQL, Oracle, R, sed.PCRE support may be enabled in later versions or by using extensions
ERE/awk/egrep/emacs
    Outside a character class: . ^ $ * + ? ( ) [ { } \ |
    Inside a character class: ^ - [ ]
BRE/ed/grep/sed
    Outside a character class: . ^ $ * [ \
    Inside a character class: ^ - [ ]
    For literals, don't escape: + ? ( ) { } |
    For standard regex behavior, escape: \+ \? \( \) \{ \} \|
Notes
If unsure about a specific character, it can be escaped like \xFF
Alphanumeric characters cannot be escaped with a backslash
Arbitrary symbols can be escaped with a backslash in PCRE, but not BRE/ERE (they must only be escaped when required). For PCRE ] - only need escaping within a character class, but I kept them in a single list for simplicity
Quoted expression strings must also have the surrounding quote characters escaped, and often with backslashes doubled-up (like "(\")(/)(\\.)" versus /(")(\/)(\.)/ in JavaScript)
Aside from escapes, different regex implementations may support different modifiers, character classes, anchors, quantifiers, and other features. For more details, check out regular-expressions.info, or use regex101.com to test your expressions live
Unfortunately there really isn't a set set of escape codes since it varies based on the language you are using.
However, keeping a page like the Regular Expression Tools Page or this Regular Expression Cheatsheet can go a long way to help you quickly filter things out.
POSIX recognizes multiple variations on regular expressions - basic regular expressions (BRE) and extended regular expressions (ERE). And even then, there are quirks because of the historical implementations of the utilities standardized by POSIX.
There isn't a simple rule for when to use which notation, or even which notation a given command uses.
Check out Jeff Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions book.
Unfortunately, the meaning of things like ( and \( are swapped between Emacs style regular expressions and most other styles. So if you try to escape these you may be doing the opposite of what you want.
So you really have to know what style you are trying to quote.
Really, there isn't. there are about a half-zillion different regex syntaxes; they seem to come down to Perl, EMACS/GNU, and AT&T in general, but I'm always getting surprised too.
Sometimes simple escaping is not possible with the characters you've listed. For example, using a backslash to escape a bracket isn't going to work in the left hand side of a substitution string in sed, namely
sed -e 's/foo\(bar/something_else/'
I tend to just use a simple character class definition instead, so the above expression becomes
sed -e 's/foo[(]bar/something_else/'
which I find works for most regexp implementations.
BTW Character classes are pretty vanilla regexp components so they tend to work in most situations where you need escaped characters in regexps.
Edit: After the comment below, just thought I'd mention the fact that you also have to consider the difference between finite state automata and non-finite state automata when looking at the behaviour of regexp evaluation.
You might like to look at "the shiny ball book" aka Effective Perl (sanitised Amazon link), specifically the chapter on regular expressions, to get a feel for then difference in regexp engine evaluation types.
Not all the world's a PCRE!
Anyway, regexp's are so clunky compared to SNOBOL! Now that was an interesting programming course! Along with the one on Simula.
Ah the joys of studying at UNSW in the late '70's! (-:
https://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html#Quoting-metacharacters and https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/quotemeta.html
In the official documentation, such characters are called metacharacters. Example of quoting:
my $regex = quotemeta($string)
s/$regex/something/
For PHP, "it is always safe to precede a non-alphanumeric with "\" to specify that it stands for itself." - http://php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.escape.php.
Except if it's a " or '. :/
To escape regex pattern variables (or partial variables) in PHP use preg_quote()
To know when and what to escape without attempts is necessary to understand precisely the chain of contexts the string pass through. You will specify the string from the farthest side to its final destination which is the memory handled by the regexp parsing code.
Be aware how the string in memory is processed: if can be a plain string inside the code, or a string entered to the command line, but a could be either an interactive command line or a command line stated inside a shell script file, or inside a variable in memory mentioned by the code, or an (string)argument through further evaluation, or a string containing code generated dynamically with any sort of encapsulation...
Each of this context assigned some characters with special functionality.
When you want to pass the character literally without using its special function (local to the context), than that's the case you have to escape it, for the next context... which might need some other escape characters which might additionally need to be escaped in the preceding context(s).
Furthermore there can be things like character encoding (the most insidious is utf-8 because it look like ASCII for common characters, but might be optionally interpreted even by the terminal depending on its settings so it might behave differently, then the encoding attribute of HTML/XML, it's necessary to understand the process precisely right.
E.g. A regexp in the command line starting with perl -npe, needs to be transferred to a set of exec system calls connecting as pipe the file handles, each of this exec system calls just has a list of arguments that were separated by (non escaped)spaces, and possibly pipes(|) and redirection (> N> N>&M), parenthesis, interactive expansion of * and ?, $(()) ... (all this are special characters used by the *sh which might appear to interfere with the character of the regular expression in the next context, but they are evaluated in order: before the command line. The command line is read by a program as bash/sh/csh/tcsh/zsh, essentially inside double quote or single quote the escape is simpler but it is not necessary to quote a string in the command line because mostly the space has to be prefixed with backslash and the quote are not necessary leaving available the expand functionality for characters * and ?, but this parse as different context as within quote. Then when the command line is evaluated the regexp obtained in memory (not as written in the command line) receives the same treatment as it would be in a source file.
For regexp there is character-set context within square brackets [ ], perl regular expression can be quoted by a large set of non alfa-numeric characters (E.g. m// or m:/better/for/path: ...).
You have more details about characters in other answer, which are very specific to the final regexp context. As I noted you mention that you find the regexp escape with attempts, that's probably because different context has different set of character that confused your memory of attempts (often backslash is the character used in those different context to escape a literal character instead of its function).
For Ionic (Typescript) you have to double slash in order to scape the characters.
For example (this is to match some special characters):
"^(?=.*[\\]\\[!¡\'=ªº\\-\\_ç##$%^&*(),;\\.?\":{}|<>\+\\/])"
Pay attention to this ] [ - _ . / characters. They have to be double slashed. If you don't do that, you are going to have a type error in your code.
to avoid having to worry about which regex variant and all the bespoke peculiarties, just use this generic function that covers every regex variant other than BRE (unless they have unicode multi-byte chars that are meta) :
jot -s '' -c - 32 126 |
mawk '
function ___(__,_) {
return substr(_="",
gsub("[][!-/_\140:-#{-~]","[&]",__),
gsub("["(_="\\\\")"^]",_ "&",__))__
} ($++NF = ___($!_))^_'
!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?
#ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_
`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~
[!]["][#][$][%][&]['][(][)][*][+][,][-][.][/]
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 [:][;][<][=][>][?]
[#] ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ [[]\\ []]\^ [_]
[`] abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz [{][|][}][~]
square-brackets are much easier to deal with, since there's no risk of triggering warning messages about "escaping too much", e.g. :
function ____(_) {
return substr("", gsub("[[:punct:]]","\\\\&",_))_
}
\!\"\#\$\%\&\'\(\)\*\+\,\-\.\/ 0123456789\:\;\<\=\>\?
\#ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ\[\\\]\^\_\`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz \{\|\}\~
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\!' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\"' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\#' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\%' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\&' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\,' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\:' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\;' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\=' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\#' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\_' is not a known regexp operator
gawk: cmd. line:1: warning: regexp escape sequence `\~' is not a known regexp operator
Using Raku (formerly known as Perl_6)
Works (backslash or quote all non-alphanumeric characters except underscore):
~$ raku -e 'say $/ if "#.*?" ~~ m/ \# \. \* \? /; #works fine'
「#.*?」
There exist six flavors of Regular Expression languages, according to Damian Conway's pdf/talk "Everything You Know About Regexes Is Wrong". Raku represents a significant (~15 year) re-working of standard Perl(5)/PCRE Regular Expressions.
In those 15 years the Perl_6 / Raku language experts decided that all non-alphanumeric characters (except underscore) shall be reserved as Regex metacharacters even if no present usage exists. To denote non-alphanumeric characters (except underscore) as literals, backslash or escape them.
So the above example prints the $/ match variable if a match to a literal #.*? character sequence is found. Below is what happens if you don't: # is interpreted as the start of a comment, . dot is interpreted as any character (including whitespace), * asterisk is interpreted as a zero-or-more quantifier, and ? question mark is interpreted as either a zero-or-one quantifier or a frugal (i.e. non-greedy) quantifier-modifier (depending on context):
Errors:
~$ ~$ raku -e 'say $/ if "#.*?" ~~ m/ # . * ? /; #ERROR!'
===SORRY!===
Regex not terminated.
at -e:1
------> y $/ if "#.*?" ~~ m/ # . * ? /; #ERROR!⏏<EOL>
Regex not terminated.
at -e:1
------> y $/ if "#.*?" ~~ m/ # . * ? /; #ERROR!⏏<EOL>
Couldn't find terminator / (corresponding / was at line 1)
at -e:1
------> y $/ if "#.*?" ~~ m/ # . * ? /; #ERROR!⏏<EOL>
expecting any of:
/
https://docs.raku.org/language/regexes
https://raku.org/

Regular Expression of Bash and TCL

Are Regular Expressions(REs) of BASH and TCL same?
Can i put same BASH REs in regexp function of TCL and will it give me same result?
Thanks
Bash regular expressions are documented as:
When [the ‘=~’ operator] is used, the string to the right of the operator is considered an extended regular expression and matched accordingly (as in regex3)).
Tcl
regular expressions are documented as:
DIFFERENT FLAVORS OF REs
Regular expressions (“RE”s), as defined by POSIX, come in two flavors: extended REs (“ERE”s) and basic REs (“BRE”s). EREs are roughly those of the traditional egrep, while BREs are roughly those of the traditional ed. This implementation adds a third flavor, advanced REs (“ARE”s), basically EREs with some significant extensions.
This manual page primarily describes AREs. BREs mostly exist for backward compatibility in some old programs; they will be discussed at the end. POSIX EREs are almost an exact subset of AREs. Features of AREs that are not present in EREs will be indicated.
So, you can use a bash regular expression with the Tcl regex engine, but not necessarily the other way around.
Note that bash regular expressions may have extra quoting that would need to be altered for Tcl.

Converting PCRE to POSIX regular expression

I am working on a MySQL database and noticed that it doesn't natively support PCRE (requires a plugin).
I wish to use these three for some data validation (these are actually the values given to the pattern attribute):
^[A-z\. ]{3,36}
^[a-z\d\.]{3,24}$
^(?=^.{4,}$)(?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?!.*\s).*$
How do I do this?
I looked on the web but couldn't find any concrete examples or answers. Also there seem to exist no utilities that could do this automatically.
I am aware that some times, such conversions are not exact and can produce differences but I am willing to try.
The MySQL docs state that:
MySQL uses Henry Spencer's implementation of regular expressions, which is aimed at conformance with POSIX 1003.2. MySQL uses the extended version to support pattern-matching operations performed with the REGEXP operator in SQL statements.
Ok, so we're talking about POSIX ERE.
This page lists the details between various regex flavors, so I'll use it as a cheatsheet.
^[A-z\. ]{3,36}
You're using:
Anchors: ^
Character classes: [...]
The range quantifier: {n,m}
All of these are supported out of the box in POSIX ERE, so you can use this expression as-is. But escaping the . in the character class is redundant, and A-z is most probably wrong in a character class (it includes [\]^_\`), so just write:
^[A-Za-z. ]{3,36}
^[a-z\d\.]{3,24}$
This one uses \d as well, which is unsupported in POSIX ERE. So you have to write:
^[a-z0-9.]{3,24}$
^(?=^.{4,}$)(?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?!.*\s).*$
Meh. You're using lookaheads. These are totally out of the scope for POSIX ERE, but you can work around this limitation by combining several SQL clauses for an equivalent logic:
WHERE LENGTH(foo) >= 4
AND foo REGEXP '[0-9]'
AND foo REGEXP '[a-z]'
AND foo REGEXP '[A-Z]'
AND NOT foo REGEXP '[ \t\r\n]'