I'm conducting a mass search of files in notepad++ and I need to determine if there are no values between a set of tags (i.e. ).
".*?" will search for 0 or more characters (well, most), which is fine. But I'm looking for a set of tags with at least one character between them.
".+?" is similar to the above and does work in notepad++.
I tried the following, which was unsuccessful:
<author>.{0}?</author>
Thank you for any help.
Since you look for something that doesn't exist you don't have to make it that complicated. Simply searching for <author></author> would do the trick, wouldn't it? If you want to include space-characters as "nothing" you could modify it to the following:
<author>\s*?</author>
Output:
<author></author> Match
<author> </author> Match
<author>something</author> No match
I don't understand why you are using the "?" operator; ".+" should yield the result you need.
Related
I need to write a regular expression to catch the following things in bold
class="something_A211"
style="width:380px;margin-top: 20px;"
I have no idea how to write it, can someone help me?
I need this because, in html file i have to replace (whit notepad++) with empty, so i want to have a clear < tr > or < td > or anything else.
Thank you
You can use a regex like this to capture the content:
((?:class|style)=".*?")
Working demo
However, if you just want to match and delete that you can get rid of capturing groups:
(?:class|style)=".*?"
For all constructions like something="data", you can use this.
[^\s]*?\=\".*?\"
https://regex101.com/r/oQ5dR0/1
The link shows you what everything does.
To explain it briefly, a non space character can come before the "=" any mumber of times, then comes the quotes and info inside of them.
The question mark in .*? (and character any number of times) is needed so only the minimum amount of characters will be used (instead of looking for the next possible quotes somewhere further along)
I'm trying to filter using regex in mySQL.
The field is a text field and I want to find all that match 'MD' or similar ('M.D.', 'M. D.', 'DDS, M.D.' etc.).
I do not want to accept those that contain M and D as a part of another acronym (e.g., 'DMD'). However 'DMD, M.D.' I would want to find.
Apologies if this is a simple task - I read through some regex tutorials and couldn't figure this out! Thanks.
Update:
With help from the suggestions I arrived at the following solution:
(\s|^)M\.?\s*D\.?
which works for all of my cases. The quotes in my questions were to indicate it was a string, they are not a part of the string.
You can use a regex like this:
\b(M\.?\s*D\.?|D\.?\s*D\.?\s*S\.?)
Working demo
If I have understood your requirement:
'([^'.]*[ ,]*M[. ]*D[. ]*)'
this looks for MD preceded by space comma or ' separated by 0 or more dots & spaces, followed by '
it matches all the contents between the '' marks
test: https://regex101.com/r/oV2kV8/2
In the end I found this solution works:
(\s|^)M\.?\s*D\.?(\s|$)
This allows for the 'MD' to be at the start or after another credential and to have spaces or periods or nothing between the letters.
I have a regex '^[A0-Z9]+$' that works until it reaches strings with 'special' characters like a period or dash.
List:
UPPER
lower
UPPER lower
lower UPPER
TEST
test
UPPER2.2-1
UPPER2
Gives:
UPPER
TEST
UPPER2
How do I get the regex to ignore non-alphanumeric characters also so it includes UPPER2.2-1 also?
I have a link here to show it 'real-time': http://www.rubular.com/r/ev23M7G1O3
This is for MySQL REGEX
EDIT: I didn't specify I wanted all non-alphanumeric characters (including spaces), but with the help of others here it led me to this: '^[A-Z-0-9[:punct:][:space:]]+$' is there anything wrong with this?
Try
'^[A-Z0-9.-]+$'
You just need to add the special characters to the group, optionally escaping them.
Additionally if you choose not to escape the -, be aware that it should be placed at the start or the end of the grouping expression to avoid the chance that it may be interpreted as delimiting a range.
To your updated question, if you want all non-whitespace, try using a group such as:
^[^ ]+$
which will match everything except for a space.
If instead what you wanted is all non-whitespace and non-lowercase, you likely will want to use:
^[^ a-z]+$
The 'trick' used here is adding a caret symbol after the opening [ in the group expression. This indicates that we want the negation of the match.
Following the pattern, we can also apply this 'trick' to get everything but lowercase letters like this:
^[^a-z]+$
I'm not really sure which of the 3 above you want, but if nothing else, this ought to serve as a good example of what you can do with character classes.
I believe you are looking for (one?) uppercase-word match, where word is pretty much anything.
^[^a-z\s]+$
...or if you want to allow more words with spaces, then probably just
^[^a-z]+$
You just need to put in the . and -. In theory, you don't need to escape because they are inside the brackets, but I like to to remind myself to escape when I have to.
'^[A-Z0-9\.\-]+$'
Try regular expression as below:
'^[A0-Z0\\.\\-]+$'
I know this has been asked at least a thousand times but I can't find a proper regex that will match a name in this string here:
<td><div id="topbarUserName">Donald</div></td>
I want to get the name 'Donald' and the regex that's the closest is >[a-zA-Z0-9]+ but the result is >Donald.
I'm coding in PureBasic (It's syntax is similar to that of Basic) and it uses the PCRE library for regular expressions.
Can anyone help?
Josh's pattern will work if you only make use of the numbered group, not the whole match. If you have to use the whole match, use something like (?<=>)(\w+?)(?=<)
Either way, regex is widely known to not be good for parsing HTML.
Explanation:
(?<=) is used to check if something appears before the current item.
\w+? will match any "word"-character, one or more times, but stop whenever the rest of the pattern matches something, for this situation the ? could have been left out.
(?=) is used to check if something appears after the current item.
Try this
It should capture anything that is a letter / number
>([\w]+)<
Also I'm not exactly sure what your project limitations are, but it would be much easier to do something like this
$('#topbarUserName').text();
in jQuery instead of using a regex.
>([a-zA-Z]+) should do the Trick. Remember to get the grouping right.
Why not doing it with plain old basic string-functions?
a.w = FindString(HTMLstring.s, "topbarUserName") + 16 ; 2 for "> and topbar...
If a > 0
b.w = FindString(HTMLstring, "<", a)
If b > 0
c.w = b - a
Donald.s = Mid(HTMLstring,a, c)
EndIf
EndIf
Debug Donald
Is there a way to indicate that two or more regex phrases can occur in any order? For instance, XML attributes can be written in any order. Say that I have the following XML:
Home
Home
How would I write a match that checks the class and title and works for both cases? I'm mainly looking for the syntax that allows me to check in any order, not just matching the class and title as I can do that. Is there any way besides just including both combinations and connecting them with a '|'?
Edit: My preference would be to do it in a single regex as I'm building it programatically and also unit testing it.
No, I believe the best way to do it with a single RE is exactly as you describe. Unfortunately, it'll get very messy when your XML can have 5 different attributes, giving you a large number of different REs to check.
On the other hand, I wouldn't be doing this with an RE at all since they're not meant to be programming languages. What's wrong with the old fashioned approach of using an XML processing library?
If you're required to use an RE, this answer probably won't help much, but I believe in using the right tools for the job.
Have you considered xpath? (where attribute order doesn't matter)
//a[#class and #title]
Will select both <a> nodes as valid matches. The only caveat being that the input must be xhtml (well formed xml).
You can create a lookahead for each of the attributes and plug them into a regex for the whole tag. For example, the regex for the tag could be
<a\b[^<>]*>
If you're using this on XML you'll probably need something more elaborate. By itself, this base regex will match a tag with zero or more attributes. Then you add a lookhead for each of the attributes you want to match:
(?=[^<>]*\s+class="link")
(?=[^<>]*\s+title="Home")
The [^<>]* lets it scan ahead for the attribute, but won't let it look beyond the closing angle bracket. Matching the leading whitespace here in the lookahead serves two purposes: it's more flexible than matching it in the base regex, and it ensure that we're matching a whole attribute name. Combining them we get:
<a\b(?=[^<>]*\s+class="link")(?=[^<>]*\s+title="Home")[^<>]+>[^<>]+</a>
Of course, I've made some simplifying assumptions for the sake of clarity. I didn't allow for whitespace around the equals signs, for single-quotes or no quotes around the attribute values, or for angle brackets in the attribute values (which I hear is legal, but I've never seen it done). Plugging those leaks (if you need to) will make the regex uglier, but won't require changes to the basic structure.
You could use named groups to pull the attributes out of the tag. Run the regex and then loop over the groups doing whatever tests that you need.
Something like this (untested, using .net regex syntax with the \w for word characters and \s for whitespace):
<a ((?<key>\w+)\s?=\s?['"](?<value>\w+)['"])+ />
The easiest way would be to write a regex that picks up the <a .... > part, and then write two more regexes to pull out the class and the title. Although you could probably do it with a single regex, it would be very complicated, and probably a lot more error prone.
With a single regex you would need something like
<a[^>]*((class="([^"]*)")|(title="([^"]*)"))?((title="([^"]*)")|(class="([^"]*)"))?[^>]*>
Which is just a first hand guess without checking to see if it's even valid. Much easier to just divide and conquer the problem.
An first ad hoc solution might be to do the following.
((class|title)="[^"]*?" *)+
This is far from perfect because it allows every attribute to occur more than once. I could imagine that this might be solveable with assertions. But if you just want to extract the attributes this might already be sufficent.
If you want to match a permutation of a set of elements, you could use a combination of back references and zero-width
negative forward matching.
Say you want to match any one of these six lines:
123-abc-456-def-789-ghi-0AB
123-abc-456-ghi-789-def-0AB
123-def-456-abc-789-ghi-0AB
123-def-456-ghi-789-abc-0AB
123-ghi-456-abc-789-def-0AB
123-ghi-456-def-789-abc-0AB
You can do this with the following regex:
/123-(abc|def|ghi)-456-(?!\1)(abc|def|ghi)-789-(?!\1|\2)(abc|def|ghi)-0AB/
The back references (\1, \2), let you refer to your previous matches, and the zero
width forward matching ((?!...) ) lets you negate a positional match, saying don't match if the
contained matches at this position. Combining the two makes sure that your match is a legit permutation
of the given elements, with each possibility only occuring once.
So, for example, in ruby:
input = <<LINES
123-abc-456-abc-789-abc-0AB
123-abc-456-abc-789-def-0AB
123-abc-456-abc-789-ghi-0AB
123-abc-456-def-789-abc-0AB
123-abc-456-def-789-def-0AB
123-abc-456-def-789-ghi-0AB
123-abc-456-ghi-789-abc-0AB
123-abc-456-ghi-789-def-0AB
123-abc-456-ghi-789-ghi-0AB
123-def-456-abc-789-abc-0AB
123-def-456-abc-789-def-0AB
123-def-456-abc-789-ghi-0AB
123-def-456-def-789-abc-0AB
123-def-456-def-789-def-0AB
123-def-456-def-789-ghi-0AB
123-def-456-ghi-789-abc-0AB
123-def-456-ghi-789-def-0AB
123-def-456-ghi-789-ghi-0AB
123-ghi-456-abc-789-abc-0AB
123-ghi-456-abc-789-def-0AB
123-ghi-456-abc-789-ghi-0AB
123-ghi-456-def-789-abc-0AB
123-ghi-456-def-789-def-0AB
123-ghi-456-def-789-ghi-0AB
123-ghi-456-ghi-789-abc-0AB
123-ghi-456-ghi-789-def-0AB
123-ghi-456-ghi-789-ghi-0AB
LINES
# outputs only the permutations
puts input.grep(/123-(abc|def|ghi)-456-(?!\1)(abc|def|ghi)-789-(?!\1|\2)(abc|def|ghi)-0AB/)
For a permutation of five elements, it would be:
/1-(abc|def|ghi|jkl|mno)-
2-(?!\1)(abc|def|ghi|jkl|mno)-
3-(?!\1|\2)(abc|def|ghi|jkl|mno)-
4-(?!\1|\2|\3)(abc|def|ghi|jkl|mno)-
5-(?!\1|\2|\3|\4)(abc|def|ghi|jkl|mno)-6/x
For your example, the regex would be
/<a href="home.php" (class="link"|title="Home") (?!\1)(class="link"|title="Home")>Home<\/a>/