This is almost certainly something really silly that I've overlooked but I'm stumped. The following C# style expression is supposed to match phones numbers (a limited subset of them, but this is just testing...):
^[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{4}$
The search string is as follows:
978-454-0586\r\nother junk\r\nmore junk\r\nhttp://www.google.com\r\n
The expression matches the phone number when in isolation, however not when next to other stuff. For example, if I lop off everything after the phone it works just great.
How can I modify the expression so that it matches the phone number and doesn't get hung up on the rest of the junk?
Thanks!
The ^ and $ symbols mean "beginning of line" and "end of line" respectively. Get rid of them if you want to match in the middle of a line.
"$" in a regular expression matches the end of a line. If you remove that, the regexp should work correctly, though if you have "Foo978-454-0586", it won't work, since "^" matches the start of a line.
Are the phone numbers always on their own lines? If so add RegexOptions.Multiline to your Regex constructor. Without that the regex.match is using the beginning and end of the string for ^ and $.
The $ means end of string, not end of line.
The problem is that "^" and "$" forces it to only match on the start of the string and the end of the string.
Remove those two tags and see how you go.
Related
I'm working on some code inherited from someone else and trying to understand some regular expression code in C#:
Regex.Replace(query, #"""[^""~]+""([^~]|$)",
m => string.Format(field + "_exact:{0}", m.Value))
What is the above regular expression doing? This is in relation to input from a user performing a search. It's doing a replace of the query string using the pattern provided in the second argument, with the value of the third. But what is that regular expression? For the life of me, it doesn't make sense. Thanks.
As far as I can see, xanatos' answer is correct. I tried to understand the regex, so here it comes:
"[^"~]+"([^~]|$)
You can test our regex and play with the single parts for better understanding at http://www.regexpal.com/
1.) a single character
"
The first pattern is a literal character. Since there is no statement of relative position, it can occur everywhere.
2.) a character class
[^"~]
The next expression is the []-bracket. This is a character set. It defines a quantity of characters, which maybe follow next. It is a placeholder for one single character... So lets see inside, which content is allowed:
^"~
The definition of the character class begins with an caret (^), which is a special character. Typing a caret after the opening square bracket will negate the character class. So it's "upside down": everything following, which does not match the class expression, matches and is a valid character.
In this case, every literal character is possible, except the two excluded ones: " or ~.
3.) a special character
+
The next expression, a plus, tells the engine to attempt to match the preceding token once or more.
So the defined character class should one or multiple times repeated to match the given expression.
4.) a single character
"
To match, the expression should contain furthermore one further apostrophe, which will be the corresponding apostrophe to the first one in 1.) since the character class in (2.) hence (3.) does not permit an apostrophe.
5.) a lookaround
([^~]|$)
The first structure here to examine is the ()-bracket. This is called a "Lookaround".
It is is a special kind of group. Lookaround matches a position. It does not expand the regex match.
So this means this part does not try to find any certain characters inside of an expression
rather then to localize them.
The localisation demands has two conditions, which are connected by a logical OR by the pipeline symbol: |
So the next character of the matched expression could either be
[^~] one single character out of the class everything excluding the character ~
or
$ the end of the line (or word, if multiline-mode is not used in regex engine)
I'll try to edit my answer to a better format, since this is my first post, I first have to check out how this is working.. :)
Update:
to "detect" a Asterisk/star in front/end of the line, you have to do following:
First it's a special character, so you have to escape it with an backslash: *
To define the position, you can use:
^ to look at the beginning of the line,
$ end of the line
The overall expression would be:
^* in front of the expression to search for an * at the beginning of
the line $* at the end of the regex to demand an * at the end.
.... in your case you can add the * in the last character class to detect an * in the end:
([^~]|$|$*)
and to force an * in the end, delete the other conditions:
($*)
PS:
(somehow my regex is swallowed up by formating engine, so my update is wrong...)
The # makes it necessary to escape all the " with a second ", so "". Without it to escape the " you would have used \", but I consider it better to always use # in regexes, because the \ is used quite often, and it's boring and unreadable to always have to escape it to \\.
Let's see what the regex really is:
Console.WriteLine(#"""[^""~]+""([^~]|$)");
is
"[^"~]+"([^~]|$)
So now we can look at the "real" regex.
It looks for a " followed by one or more non-" and non-~ followed by another " followed by a non-~ or the end of the string. Note that the match could start after the start of the string and it could end before the end of the string (with a non-~)
For example in
car"hello"help
it would match "hello"h
I use this ^((\d-\d{3})|(\d{1,3}))\-\d{3}-\d{7}$ regex to validate phone numbers.
However it does not accept the following number which is valid. What is the problem?
Could it have to do with the zeros at the end?
90-312-2488900
Your regexp seems to work properly.
Maybe the problem is in the last space in your example. Try to remove it with string.Trim, or add \s* to your regexp (or even add it between every groups of numbers.
The space at the end of your example is what is causing it to not match. Go to regexpal
and type in your regex. When you try your example, it will show you what matches and what doesn't. Without the space, you are good to go. As JleruOHep recommended, try trimming the string, or allow whitespace in your regex.
Here is your phone number without whitespace at the end.
And with whitespace.
The yellow highlight is what matches.
I am looking for a way to get words out of a sentence. I am pretty far with the following expression:
\b([a-zA-Z]+?)\b
but there are some occurrences that it counts a word when I want it not to. E.g a word followed by more than one period like "text..". So, in my regex I want to have the period to be at the end of a word zero or one time. Inserting \.? did not do the trick, and variations on this have not yielded anything fruitful either.
Hope someone can help!
A single dot means any character. You must escape it as
\.?
Maybe you want an expression like this:
\w+\.?
or
\p{L}+\.?
You need to add \.? (and not .?) because the period has special meaning in regexes.
to avoid a match on your example "test.." you ask for you not only need to put the \.? for checking first character after the word to be a dot but also look one character further to check the second character after the word.
I did end up with something like this
\w{2,}\.?[^.]
You should also consider that a sentence not always ends with a . but also ! or ? and alike.
I usually use rubulator.com to quick test a regexp
I am trying to use Regex to find out if a string matches *abc - in other words, it starts with anything but finishes with "abc"?
What is the regex expression for this?
I tried *abc but "Regex.Matches" returns true for xxabcd, which is not what I want.
abc$
You need the $ to match the end of the string.
.*abc$
should do.
So you have a few "fish" here, but here's how to fish.
An online expression library and .NET-based tester: RegEx Library
An online Ruby-based tester (faster than the .NET one) Rubular
A windows app for testing exressions (most fully-featured, but no zero-width look-aheads or behind) RegEx Coach
Try this instead:
.*abc$
The $ matches the end of the line.
^.*abc$
Will capture any line ending in abc.
It depends on what exactly you're looking for. If you're trying to match whole lines, like:
a line with words and spacesabc
you could do:
^.*abc$
Where ^ matches the beginning of a line and $ the end.
But if you're matching words in a line, e.g.
trying to match thisabc and thisabc but not thisabcd
You will have to do something like:
\w*abc(?!\w)
This means, match any number of continuous characters, followed by abc and then anything but a character (e.g. whitespace or the end of the line).
If you want a string of 4 characters ending in abc use, /^.abc$/
Basically, the input field is just a string. People input their phone number in various formats. I need a regular expression to find and convert those numbers into links.
Input examples:
(201) 555-1212
(201)555-1212
201-555-1212
555-1212
Here's what I want:
(201) 555-1212 - Notice the space is gone
(201)555-1212
201-555-1212
555-1212
I know it should be more robust than just removing spaces, but it is for an internal web site that my employees will be accessing from their iPhone. So, I'm willing to "just get it working."
Here's what I have so far in C# (which should show you how little I know about regular expressions):
strchk = Regex.Replace(strchk, #"\b([\d{3}\-\d{4}|\d{3}\-\d{3}\-\d{4}|\(\d{3}\)\d{3}\-\d{4}])\b", "<a href='tel:$&'>$&</a>", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
Can anyone help me by fixing this or suggesting a better way to do this?
EDIT:
Thanks everyone. Here's what I've got so far:
strchk = Regex.Replace(strchk, #"\b(\d{3}[-\.\s]\d{3}[-\.\s]\d{4}|\(\d{3}\)\s*\d{3}[-\.\s]\d{4}|\d{3}[-\.\s]\d{4})\b", "<a href='tel:$1'>$1</a>", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
It is picking up just about everything EXCEPT those with (nnn) area codes, with or without spaces between it and the 7 digit number. It does pick up the 7 digit number and link it that way. However, if the area code is specified it doesn't get matched. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?
Second Edit:
Got it working now. All I did was remove the \b from the start of the string.
Remove the [] and add \s* (zero or more whitespace characters) around each \-.
Also, you don't need to escape the -. (You can take out the \ from \-)
Explanation: [abcA-Z] is a character group, which matches a, b, c, or any character between A and Z.
It's not what you're trying to do.
Edits
In response to your updated regex:
Change [-\.\s] to [-\.\s]+ to match one or more of any of those characters (eg, a - with spaces around it)
The problem is that \b doesn't match the boundary between a space and a (.
Afaik, no phone enters the other characters, so why not replace [^0-9] with '' ?
Here's a regex I wrote for finding phone numbers:
(\+?\d[-\.\s]?)?(\(\d{3}\)\s?|\d{3}[-\.\s]?)\d{3}[-\.\s]?\d{4}
It's pretty flexible... allows a variety of formats.
Then, instead of killing yourself trying to replace it w/out spaces using a bunch of back references, instead pass the match to a function and just strip the spaces as you wanted.
C#/.net should have a method that allows a function as the replace argument...
Edit: They call it a `MatchEvaluator. That example uses a delegate, but I'm pretty sure you could use the slightly less verbose
(m) => m.Value.Replace(' ', '')
or something. working from memory here.