I have a string that looks like this:
string1 + \t\t\t\t\t\t\t + string2
string1 can be anything and string2 can be one of the following: Display, Search, Fee. For the escaped characters, sometimes I get 10, sometimes I get 5, sometimes I get some amount N... I am only expecting one \t character between string1 and string2.
What I have so far:
string newLine0 = line.Replace("\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDisplay", "\tDisplay");
string newline1 = newLine0.Replace("\t\tFee", "\tFee");
string newLine2 = newline1.Replace("\t\tSearch", "\tSearch");
string newLine3 = newLine2.Replace("\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDisplay", "\tDisplay");
string newLine4 = newLine3.Replace("\t\tDisplay", "\tDisplay");
Is there a better way to do this with cleaner code and less variables?
It seems like you could simply replace instances of more than one \t with a single \t:
string newLine = Regex.Replace(line, #"\t{2,}", "\t");
If you only want to remove extra tabs if one of the words Display, Fee or Search follows, use
string newLine = Regex.Replace(line, #"\t{2,}(?=Display|Fee|Search)", "\t");
If N tabs precede a word, make N be 1:
string newLine = Regex.Replace(line, #"\b(\t+)(\t\w)\2\b", "$+");
\b - starting from a word boundary
(\t+) - match one or more tabs (first grouping)
(\t\w) - followed by just one tab and a word (second grouping)
\2 - match the second captured group
$+ - substitute the whole match (/\t*\w/) with only the second matched group (/\t\w).
Related
I'm new to regular expressions and would appreciate your help. I'm trying to put together an expression that will split the example string using all spaces that are not surrounded by single or double quotes. My last attempt looks like this: (?!") and isn't quite working. It's splitting on the space before the quote.
Example input:
This is a string that "will be" highlighted when your 'regular expression' matches something.
Desired output:
This
is
a
string
that
will be
highlighted
when
your
regular expression
matches
something.
Note that "will be" and 'regular expression' retain the space between the words.
I don't understand why all the others are proposing such complex regular expressions or such long code. Essentially, you want to grab two kinds of things from your string: sequences of characters that aren't spaces or quotes, and sequences of characters that begin and end with a quote, with no quotes in between, for two kinds of quotes. You can easily match those things with this regular expression:
[^\s"']+|"([^"]*)"|'([^']*)'
I added the capturing groups because you don't want the quotes in the list.
This Java code builds the list, adding the capturing group if it matched to exclude the quotes, and adding the overall regex match if the capturing group didn't match (an unquoted word was matched).
List<String> matchList = new ArrayList<String>();
Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("[^\\s\"']+|\"([^\"]*)\"|'([^']*)'");
Matcher regexMatcher = regex.matcher(subjectString);
while (regexMatcher.find()) {
if (regexMatcher.group(1) != null) {
// Add double-quoted string without the quotes
matchList.add(regexMatcher.group(1));
} else if (regexMatcher.group(2) != null) {
// Add single-quoted string without the quotes
matchList.add(regexMatcher.group(2));
} else {
// Add unquoted word
matchList.add(regexMatcher.group());
}
}
If you don't mind having the quotes in the returned list, you can use much simpler code:
List<String> matchList = new ArrayList<String>();
Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("[^\\s\"']+|\"[^\"]*\"|'[^']*'");
Matcher regexMatcher = regex.matcher(subjectString);
while (regexMatcher.find()) {
matchList.add(regexMatcher.group());
}
There are several questions on StackOverflow that cover this same question in various contexts using regular expressions. For instance:
parsings strings: extracting words and phrases
Best way to parse Space Separated Text
UPDATE: Sample regex to handle single and double quoted strings. Ref: How can I split on a string except when inside quotes?
m/('.*?'|".*?"|\S+)/g
Tested this with a quick Perl snippet and the output was as reproduced below. Also works for empty strings or whitespace-only strings if they are between quotes (not sure if that's desired or not).
This
is
a
string
that
"will be"
highlighted
when
your
'regular expression'
matches
something.
Note that this does include the quote characters themselves in the matched values, though you can remove that with a string replace, or modify the regex to not include them. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader or another poster for now, as 2am is way too late to be messing with regular expressions anymore ;)
If you want to allow escaped quotes inside the string, you can use something like this:
(?:(['"])(.*?)(?<!\\)(?>\\\\)*\1|([^\s]+))
Quoted strings will be group 2, single unquoted words will be group 3.
You can try it on various strings here: http://www.fileformat.info/tool/regex.htm or http://gskinner.com/RegExr/
The regex from Jan Goyvaerts is the best solution I found so far, but creates also empty (null) matches, which he excludes in his program. These empty matches also appear from regex testers (e.g. rubular.com).
If you turn the searches arround (first look for the quoted parts and than the space separed words) then you might do it in once with:
("[^"]*"|'[^']*'|[\S]+)+
(?<!\G".{0,99999})\s|(?<=\G".{0,99999}")\s
This will match the spaces not surrounded by double quotes.
I have to use min,max {0,99999} because Java doesn't support * and + in lookbehind.
It'll probably be easier to search the string, grabbing each part, vs. split it.
Reason being, you can have it split at the spaces before and after "will be". But, I can't think of any way to specify ignoring the space between inside a split.
(not actual Java)
string = "This is a string that \"will be\" highlighted when your 'regular expression' matches something.";
regex = "\"(\\\"|(?!\\\").)+\"|[^ ]+"; // search for a quoted or non-spaced group
final = new Array();
while (string.length > 0) {
string = string.trim();
if (Regex(regex).test(string)) {
final.push(Regex(regex).match(string)[0]);
string = string.replace(regex, ""); // progress to next "word"
}
}
Also, capturing single quotes could lead to issues:
"Foo's Bar 'n Grill"
//=>
"Foo"
"s Bar "
"n"
"Grill"
String.split() is not helpful here because there is no way to distinguish between spaces within quotes (don't split) and those outside (split). Matcher.lookingAt() is probably what you need:
String str = "This is a string that \"will be\" highlighted when your 'regular expression' matches something.";
str = str + " "; // add trailing space
int len = str.length();
Matcher m = Pattern.compile("((\"[^\"]+?\")|('[^']+?')|([^\\s]+?))\\s++").matcher(str);
for (int i = 0; i < len; i++)
{
m.region(i, len);
if (m.lookingAt())
{
String s = m.group(1);
if ((s.startsWith("\"") && s.endsWith("\"")) ||
(s.startsWith("'") && s.endsWith("'")))
{
s = s.substring(1, s.length() - 1);
}
System.out.println(i + ": \"" + s + "\"");
i += (m.group(0).length() - 1);
}
}
which produces the following output:
0: "This"
5: "is"
8: "a"
10: "string"
17: "that"
22: "will be"
32: "highlighted"
44: "when"
49: "your"
54: "regular expression"
75: "matches"
83: "something."
I liked Marcus's approach, however, I modified it so that I could allow text near the quotes, and support both " and ' quote characters. For example, I needed a="some value" to not split it into [a=, "some value"].
(?<!\\G\\S{0,99999}[\"'].{0,99999})\\s|(?<=\\G\\S{0,99999}\".{0,99999}\"\\S{0,99999})\\s|(?<=\\G\\S{0,99999}'.{0,99999}'\\S{0,99999})\\s"
Jan's approach is great but here's another one for the record.
If you actually wanted to split as mentioned in the title, keeping the quotes in "will be" and 'regular expression', then you could use this method which is straight out of Match (or replace) a pattern except in situations s1, s2, s3 etc
The regex:
'[^']*'|\"[^\"]*\"|( )
The two left alternations match complete 'quoted strings' and "double-quoted strings". We will ignore these matches. The right side matches and captures spaces to Group 1, and we know they are the right spaces because they were not matched by the expressions on the left. We replace those with SplitHere then split on SplitHere. Again, this is for a true split case where you want "will be", not will be.
Here is a full working implementation (see the results on the online demo).
import java.util.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.regex.*;
import java.util.List;
class Program {
public static void main (String[] args) throws java.lang.Exception {
String subject = "This is a string that \"will be\" highlighted when your 'regular expression' matches something.";
Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("\'[^']*'|\"[^\"]*\"|( )");
Matcher m = regex.matcher(subject);
StringBuffer b= new StringBuffer();
while (m.find()) {
if(m.group(1) != null) m.appendReplacement(b, "SplitHere");
else m.appendReplacement(b, m.group(0));
}
m.appendTail(b);
String replaced = b.toString();
String[] splits = replaced.split("SplitHere");
for (String split : splits) System.out.println(split);
} // end main
} // end Program
If you are using c#, you can use
string input= "This is a string that \"will be\" highlighted when your 'regular expression' matches <something random>";
List<string> list1 =
Regex.Matches(input, #"(?<match>\w+)|\""(?<match>[\w\s]*)""|'(?<match>[\w\s]*)'|<(?<match>[\w\s]*)>").Cast<Match>().Select(m => m.Groups["match"].Value).ToList();
foreach(var v in list1)
Console.WriteLine(v);
I have specifically added "|<(?[\w\s]*)>" to highlight that you can specify any char to group phrases. (In this case I am using < > to group.
Output is :
This
is
a
string
that
will be
highlighted
when
your
regular expression
matches
something random
1st one-liner using String.split()
String s = "This is a string that \"will be\" highlighted when your 'regular expression' matches something.";
String[] split = s.split( "(?<!(\"|').{0,255}) | (?!.*\\1.*)" );
[This, is, a, string, that, "will be", highlighted, when, your, 'regular expression', matches, something.]
don't split at the blank, if the blank is surrounded by single or double quotes
split at the blank when the 255 characters to the left and all characters to the right of the blank are neither single nor double quotes
adapted from original post (handles only double quotes)
I'm reasonably certain this is not possible using regular expressions alone. Checking whether something is contained inside some other tag is a parsing operation. This seems like the same problem as trying to parse XML with a regex -- it can't be done correctly. You may be able to get your desired outcome by repeatedly applying a non-greedy, non-global regex that matches the quoted strings, then once you can't find anything else, split it at the spaces... that has a number of problems, including keeping track of the original order of all the substrings. Your best bet is to just write a really simple function that iterates over the string and pulls out the tokens you want.
A couple hopefully helpful tweaks on Jan's accepted answer:
(['"])((?:\\\1|.)+?)\1|([^\s"']+)
Allows escaped quotes within quoted strings
Avoids repeating the pattern for the single and double quote; this also simplifies adding more quoting symbols if needed (at the expense of one more capturing group)
You can also try this:
String str = "This is a string that \"will be\" highlighted when your 'regular expression' matches something";
String ss[] = str.split("\"|\'");
for (int i = 0; i < ss.length; i++) {
if ((i % 2) == 0) {//even
String[] part1 = ss[i].split(" ");
for (String pp1 : part1) {
System.out.println("" + pp1);
}
} else {//odd
System.out.println("" + ss[i]);
}
}
The following returns an array of arguments. Arguments are the variable 'command' split on spaces, unless included in single or double quotes. The matches are then modified to remove the single and double quotes.
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
var args = Regex.Matches(command, "[^\\s\"']+|\"([^\"]*)\"|'([^']*)'").Cast<Match>
().Select(iMatch => iMatch.Value.Replace("\"", "").Replace("'", "")).ToArray();
When you come across this pattern like this :
String str = "2022-11-10 08:35:00,470 RAV=REQ YIP=02.8.5.1 CMID=caonaustr CMN=\"Some Value Pyt Ltd\"";
//this helped
String[] str1= str.split("\\s(?=(([^\"]*\"){2})*[^\"]*$)\\s*");
System.out.println("Value of split string is "+ Arrays.toString(str1));
This results in :[2022-11-10, 08:35:00,470, PLV=REQ, YIP=02.8.5.1, CMID=caonaustr, CMN="Some Value Pyt Ltd"]
This regex matches spaces ONLY if it is followed by even number of double quotes.
I have a string in the format:
abc def ghi xyz
I would like to end with it in format:
abcdefghi xyz
What is the best way to do this? In this particular case, I could just strip off the last three characters, remove spaces, and then add them back at the end, but this won't work for cases in which the multiple spaces are in the middle of the string.
In Short, I want to remove all single whitespaces, and then replace all multiple whitespaces with a single. Each of those steps is easy enough by itself, but combining them seems a bit less straightforward.
I'm willing to use regular expressions, but I would prefer not to.
This approach uses regular expressions but hopefully in a way that's still fairly readable. First, split your input string on multiple spaces
var pattern = #" +"; // match two or more spaces
var groups = Regex.Split(input, pattern);
Next, remove the (individual) spaces from each token:
var tokens = groups.Select(group => group.Replace(" ", String.Empty));
Finally, join your tokens with single spaces
var result = String.Join(' ', tokens.ToArray());
This example uses a literal space character rather than 'whitespace' (which includes tabs, linefeeds, etc.) - substitute \s for ' ' if you need to split on multiple whitespace characters rather than actual spaces.
Well, Regular Expressions would probably be the fastest here, but you could implement some algorithm that uses a lookahead for single spaces and then replaces multiple spaces in a loop:
// Replace all single whitespaces
for (int i = 0; i < sourceString.Length; i++)
{
if (sourceString[i] = ' ')
{
if (i < sourceString.Length - 1 && sourceString[i+1] != ' ')
sourceString = sourceString.Delete(i);
}
}
// Replace multiple whitespaces
while (sourceString.Contains(" ")) // Two spaces here!
sourceString = sourceString.Replace(" ", " ");
But hey, that code is pretty ugly and slow compared to a proper regular expression...
For a Non-REGEX option you can use:
string str = "abc def ghi xyz";
var result = str.Split(); //This will remove single spaces from the result
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
bool ifMultipleSpacesFound = false;
for (int i = 0; i < result.Length;i++)
{
if (!String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(result[i]))
{
sb.Append(result[i]);
ifMultipleSpacesFound = false;
}
else
{
if (!ifMultipleSpacesFound)
{
ifMultipleSpacesFound = true;
sb.Append(" ");
}
}
}
string output = sb.ToString();
The output would be:
output = "abcdefghi xyz"
Here's an approach which uses some fairly subtle logic:
public static string RemoveUnwantedSpaces(string text)
{
var sb = new StringBuilder();
char lhs = '\0';
char mid = '\0';
foreach (char rhs in text)
{
if (rhs != ' ' || (mid == ' ' && lhs != ' '))
sb.Append(rhs);
lhs = mid;
mid = rhs;
}
return sb.ToString().Trim();
}
How it works:
We will examine each possible three-character subsequence linearly across the string (in a kind of three-character sliding window). These three characters will be represented, in order, by the variables lhs, mid and rhs.
For each rhs character in the string:
If it's not a space we should output it.
If it is a space, and the previous character was also space but the one before that isn't, then this is the second in a sequence of at least two spaces, and therefore we should output one space.
Otherwise, don't output a space because this is either the first or the third (or later) space in a sequence of two or more spaces and in either case we don't want to output a space: If this happens to be the first in a sequence of two or more spaces, a space will be output when the second space comes along. If this is the third or later, we've already output a space for it.
The subtlety here is that I've avoided special casing the beginning of the sequence by initialising the lhs and mid variables with non-space characters. It doesn't matter what those values are, as long as they are not spaces, but I made them \0 to indicate that they are special values.
After second thought here is one line regex solution:
Regex.Replace("abc def ghi xyz", "( )( )*([^ ])", "$2$3")
the result of this is "abcdefghi xyz"
ORIGINAL ANSWER:
Two lines of code regex solution:
var tmp = Regex.Replace("abc def ghi xyz", "( )([^ ])", "$2")
tmp is "abcdefghi xyz"
then:
var result = Regex.Replace(tmp, "( )+", " ");
result is "abcdefghi xyz"
Explanation:
The first line of code removes single whitespaces and removes one whitespace for multiple whitespaces (so there are 3 spaces in tmp between letters i and x).
The second line just replace multiple whitespaces with one.
In-depth explanation of first line:
We match input string to regex that matches one space and non-space next to it. We also put this two characters in separate groups (we use ( ) for anonymous grouping).
So for "abc def ghi xyz" string we have this matches and groups:
match: " d" group1: " " group2: "d"
match: " g" group1: " " group2: "g"
match: " x" group1: " " group2: "x"
We are using substitution syntax for Regex.Replace method to replace match with the content of second group (which is non-whitespace character)
I found the most popular answer to this question is:
Regex.Replace(value, "[^a-zA-Z0-9]+", " ", RegexOptions.Compiled);
However, if users type in Non-English name when billing, this method will consider these non- are special characters and remove them.
Is there any way we can build for most of users since my website is multi-language.
Make it Unicode aware:
var res = Regex.Replace(value, #"[^\p{L}\p{M}\p{N}]+", " ");
If you plan to keep only regular digits, keep [0-9].
The regex matches one or more symbols other than Unicode letters (\p{L}), diacritics (\p{M}) and digits (\p{N}).
You might consider var res = Regex.Replace(value, #"\W+", " "), but it will keep _ since the underscore is a "word" character.
I found my self that the best way to achieve this and make work with all languages is create a string with all banned characters, look this code:
string input = #"heya's #FFFFF , CUL8R M8 how are you?'"; // This is the input string
string regex = #"[!""#$%&'()*+,\-./:;<=>?#[\\\]^_`{|}~]"; //Banned characters string, add all characters you don´t want to be displayed here.
Match m;
while ((m = Regex.Match(input, regex)) != null)
{
if (m.Success)
input = input.Remove(m.Index, m.Length);
else // if m.Success is false: break, because while loop can be infinite
break;
}
input = input.Replace(" ", " ").Replace(" "," "); //if string has two-three-four spaces together change it to one
MessageBox.Show(input);
Hope it works!
PS: As others posted here, there are other ways. But I personally prefer that one even though it´s way more code. Choose the one you think better fits for your needing.
I am trying to extract all of the text (shown as xxxx) in the follow pattern:
Session["xxxx"]
using c#
This may be Request.Querystring["xxxx"] so I am trying to build the expression dynamically. When I do so, I get all sorts of problems about unescaped charecters or no matches :(
an example might be:
string patternstart = "Session[";
string patternend = "]";
string regexexpr = #"\\" + patternstart + #"(.*?)\\" + patternend ;
string sText = "Text to be searched containing Session[\"xxxx\"] the result would be xxxx";
MatchCollection matches = Regex.Matches(sText, #regexexpr);
Can anyone help with this as I am stumped (as I always seem to be with RegEx :) )
With some little modifications to your code.
string patternstart = Regex.Escape("Session[");
string patternend = Regex.Escape("]");
string regexexpr = patternstart + #"(.*?)" + patternend;
The pattern you construct in your example looks something like this:
\\Session[(.*?)\\]
There are a couple of problems with this. First it assumes the string starts with a literal backslash, second, it wraps the entire (.*?) in a character class, that means it will match any single open parenthesis, period, asterisk, question mark, close parenthesis or backslash. You'd need to escape the the brackets in your pattern, if you want to match a literal [.
You could use a pattern like this:
Session\[(.*?)]
For example:
string regexexpr = #"Session\[(.*?)]";
string sText = "Text to be searched containing Session[\"xxxx\"] the result would be xxxx";
MatchCollection matches = Regex.Matches(sText, #regexexpr);
Console.WriteLine(matches[0].Groups[1].Value); // "xxxx"
The characters [ and ] have a special meaning with regular expressions - they define a group where one of the contained characters must match. To work around this, simply 'escape' them with a leading \ character:
string patternstart = "Session\[";
string patternend = "\]";
An example "final string" could then be:
Session\["(.*)"\]
However, you could easily write your RegEx to handle Session, Querystring, etc automatically if you require (without also matching every other array you throw at it), and avoid having to build up the string in the first place:
(Querystring|Session|Form)\["(.*)"\]
and then take the second match.
Problem!
I Have the following input (rules) from a flat file (talking about numeric input):
Input might be a natural number (below 1000): 1, 10, 100, 999, ...
Input might be a comma separated number surrounded by quotes (above 1000): "1,000", "2,000", "3,000", "10,000", ...
I Have the following regular expression to validate the input: (?:(\d+)|\x22([0-9]+(?:,[0-9]+)*)\x22), So for an input like 10 I'm expecting in the first matching group 10, which is exactly what I got. But when I got an input like "10,000" I'm expecting in the first matching group 10,000, but it is stored at the second matching group.
Example
string text1 = "\"" + "10,000" + "\"";
string text2 = "50";
string pattern = #"(\d+)|\x22([0-9]+(?:,[0-9]+){0,})\x22";
Match match1 = Regex.Match(text1, pattern);
Match match2 = Regex.Match(text2, pattern);
if (match1.Success)
{
Console.WriteLine("Match#1 Group#1: " + match1.Groups[1].Value);
Console.WriteLine("Match#1 Group#2: " + match1.Groups[2].Value);
# Outputs
# Match#1 Group#1:
# Match#1 Group#2: 10,000
}
if (match2.Success)
{
Console.WriteLine("Match#2 Group#1: " + match2.Groups[1].Value);
Console.WriteLine("Match#2 Group#2: " + match2.Groups[2].Value);
# Outputs
# Match#2 Group#1: 50
# Match#2 Group#2:
}
Expected Result
Both results on the same matching group, in this case 1
Questions?
What am I doing wrong? I'm just getting bad grouping from the regular expression matches.
Also, I'm using filehelpers .NET to parse the file, is there any other way to resolve this problem. Actualy I'm trying to implement a custom converter.
Object File
[FieldConverter(typeof(OOR_Quantity))]
public Int32 Quantity;
OOR_Quantity
internal class OOR_Quantity : ConverterBase
{
public override object StringToField(string from)
{
string pattern = #"(?:(\d+)|\x22([0-9]+(?:,[0-9]+)*)\x22)";
Regex regex = new Regex(pattern);
if (regex.IsMatch(from))
{
Match match = regex.Match(from);
return int.Parse(match.Groups[1].Value);
}
throw new ...
}
}
Group numbers are assigned purely on the basis of their positions in the regex--specifically, the relative position of the opening bracket, (. In your regex, (\d+) is the first group and ([0-9]+(?:,[0-9]+)*) is the second.
If you want to refer to them both with the same identifier, use named groups and give them both the same name:
#"(?:(?<NUMBER>\d+)|\x22(?<NUMBER>[0-9]+(?:,[0-9]+)*)\x22)"
Now you can retrieve the captured value as match.Groups["NUMBER"].Value.
I tested the regex below with Ruby:
text1 = "\"10,000\""
text2 = "50"
regex = /"?([0-9]+(?:,[0-9]+){0,})"?/
text1 =~ regex
puts "#$1"
text2 =~ regex
puts "#$1"
The result is:
10,000
50
I think you can rewrite in C#. Isn't it enough for you?