I am using Java. I have the following text:
"hyst and hy"
Why (hy)(?![a-z]) returns two "hy"s. The idea is to match any "hy" that is not followed by any character between a-z.
If I do hy(?![a-z]) (hy without parentheses) it works (finds only the second "hy") but I don't understand why if I use parentheses (hy) in the RegEx it matches the first "hy" in hyst
When you use a capture group you obtain two results, the first is the whole pattern and the second the capture group. The first hy has never been matched.
If you remove the parenthesis, you obtain only that match the whole pattern.
Related
I have the following regex:
^(?=\w+)(-\w+)(?!\.)
Which I'm attempting to match against the following text:
www-test1.examples.com
The regex should match only the -test1 part of the string and only if it is before the first .and after the start of the expression. www can be any string but it should not be matched.
My pattern is not matching the -test1 part. What am I missing?
Java is one of the only languages that support non-fixed-length look-behinds (which basically means you can use quantifiers), so you can technically use the following:
(?<=^\w+)(-\w+)
This will match for -test without capturing the preceding stuff. However, it's generally not advisable to use non-fixed-length look-behinds, as they are not perfect, nor are they very efficient, nor are they portable across other languages. Having said that.. this is a simple pattern, so if you don't care about portability, sure, go for it.
The better solution though is to group what you want to capture, and reference the captured group (in this case, group 1):
^\w+(-\w+)
p.s. - \w will not match a dot, so no need to look ahead for it.
p.p.s. - to answer your question about why your original pattern ^(?=\w+)(-\w+)(?!\.) doesn't match. There are 2 reasons:
1) you start out with a start of string assertion, and then use a lookahead to see if what follows is one or more word chars. But lookaheads are zero-width assertions, meaning no characters are actually consumed in the match, so the pointer doesn't move forward to the next chars after the match. So it sees that "www" matches it, and moves on to the next part of the pattern, but the actual pointer hasn't moved past the start of string. So, it next tries to match your (-\w+) part. Well your string doesn't start with "-" so the pattern fails.
2) (?!\.) is a negative lookahead. Well your example string shows a dot as the very next thing after your "-test" part. So even if #1 didn't fail it, this would fail it.
The problem you're having is the lookahead. In this case, it's inappropriate if you want to capture what's between the - and the first .. The pattern you want is something like this:
(-\w+)(?=\.)
In this case, the contents of capture group 1 will contain the text you want.
Demo on Regex101
Try this:
(?<=www)\-\w+(?=\.)
Demo: https://regex101.com/r/xEpno7/1
I am coming from this question. Now what I want is the exact opposite.
I want to match all chracters except this pattern:
yearid="[0-9]+"
Why do I do that please?
I have tried (?!yearid="[0-9]+") but it refuses to match match.
There are actually two ways to do this. You can use [^0-9]+ where the ^ negates the term inside the brackets, or \D+ where \D is any non-digit character.
re.sub(r'yearid="[0-9]+"', '', string_to_fix)
Capture the group like normal, then substitute nothing for it, and return the complete string.
Or, if you want to go the hard way and negate it:
re.sub(r'(.*?)(?:yearid="[0-9]+")(.*)', '\1\2', string_to_fix)
This first matches everything lazily (.*?), until it finds the yearid="XXXX", matches that as a noncapturing group (?:yearid="[0-9]+"), then matches everything else (.*). Finally, it replaces the original full string with just the 1st and 2nd capture groups, essentially cutting out the section you want.
I have been trying to resolve this for the past 2 days...
Please help me in understanding why this is happening. My intention is to just select the <HDR> that has a <DTL1 val="92">.....</HDR>
This is my regular expression
(?<=<HDR>).*?<DTL1\sval="3".*?</HDR>
And the input string is:
<HDR>abc<DTL1 val="1"><DTL2 val="2"></HDR><HDR><DTL1 val="92"><DTL2 val="55"></HDR><HDR><DTL1 val="3"><DTL2 val="4"></HDR>
But this regular expression selects
abc<DTL1 val="1"><DTL2 val="2"></HDR><HDR><DTL1 val="92"><DTL2 val="55"></HDR>
Can anyone please help me?
A regex engine will give you always the leftmost match in a string (even if you use a non-greedy quantifier). This is exactly what you obtain.
So, a solution is to forbid the presence of another <HDR> in the parts described by .*? that is too permissive.
You have two technics to do that, you can replace the .*? with:
(?>[^<]+|<(?!/HDR))*
or with:
(?:(?!</HDR).)*+
Most of the time, the first technic is more performant, but if your string contains an high density of <, the second way can give good results too.
The use of a possessive quantifier or an atomic group can reduce the number of steps to obtain a result in particular when the subpattern fails.
Example:
With the first way:
(?<=<HDR>)(?>[^<]+|<(?!/HDR))*<DTL1\sval="3"(?>[^<]+|<(?!/HDR))*</HDR>
or this variant:
(?<=<HDR>)(?:[^<]+|<(?!/HDR|DTL1))*+<DTL1\sval="3"(?:[^<]+|<(?!/HDR))*+</HDR>
With the second way:
(?<=<HDR>)(?:(?!</HDR).)*<DTL1\sval="3"(?:(?!</HDR).)*+</HDR>
or this variant:
(?<=<HDR>)(?:(?!</HDR|DTL1).)*+<DTL1\sval="3"(?:(?!</HDR).)*+</HDR>
Casimir et Hippolyte already gave you a couple of good solutions. I want to elaborate on a few things.
First, why your regex fails to do what you want: (?<=<HDR>).*? tells it to match any number of characters starting with the first character preceded by <HDR>, until it encounters what follows the non-greedy quantifier (<DTL1...). Well, the first character that's preceded by <HDR> is the first a, so it matches everything starting from there until the fixed string <DTL1\sval="3" is encountered.
Casimir et Hippolyte's solutions are for the generalized case, where the contents of the <HDR> tags can be anything other than nested <HDR>'s. You could also do it with a positive look-ahead:
(?<=<HDR>)(.(?!</HDR>))*<DTL1\sval="3".*?</HDR>
However, if the string is guaranteed to be in the structure shown, where the <HDR> tags only contain one or more <DTL1 val="##"> tags, so you know there won't be any closing tags within, you could do it more efficiently by replacing the first .*? with [^/]*:
(?<=<HDR>)[^/]*<DTL1\sval="3".*?</HDR>
A negated character class is more efficient than a zero-width assertion, and if you're using a negated character class, a greedy quantifier becomes more efficient than a lazy one.
Note also that by using a lookbehind to match the opening <HDR>, you're excluding it from the match, but you're including the closing </HDR>. Are you sure that's what you want? You're matching this...
<DTL1 val="3"><DTL2 val="4"></HDR>
...when presumably you want this...
<HDR><DTL1 val="3"><DTL2 val="4"></HDR>
...or this...
<DTL1 val="3"><DTL2 val="4">
So, in the fist case, don't use a lookbehind for the opening tag:
<HDR>(.(?!</HDR>))*<DTL1\sval="3".*?</HDR>
<HDR>[^/]*<DTL1\sval="3".*?</HDR>
In the second case, use a look-ahead for the closing tag:
(?<=<HDR>)(.(?!</HDR>))*<DTL1\sval="3".*?(?=</HDR>)
(?<=<HDR>)[^/]*<DTL1\sval="3".*?(?=</HDR>)
I have some larger text which in essence looks like this:
abc12..manycharshere...hi - abc23...manyothercharshere...jk
Obviously there are two items, each starting with "abc", the numbers (12 and 23) are interesting as well as the "hi" and "jk" at the end.
I would like to create a regular expression which allows me to parse out the numbers, but only if the two characters at the end match, i.e. I am looking for the number related to "jk", but the following regular expression matches the whole string and thus returns "12", not "23" even when non-greedy matching the area with the following:
abc([0-9]+).*?jk
Is there a way to construct a regular expression which matches text like the one above, i.e. retrieving "23" for items ending in "jk"?
Basically I would need something like "match abc followed by a number, but only if there is "jk" at the end before another instance of "abc followed by a number appears"
Note: the texts/matches are an abstraction here, the actual text is more complicated, espially the things that can appear as "manyothercharactershere", I simplified to show the underlying problem more clearly.
Use a regex like this. .*abc([0-9]+).*?jk
demo here
I think you want something like this,
abc([0-9]+)(?=(?:(?!jk|abc[0-9]).)*jk)
DEMO
You need to use negative lookahead here to make it work:
abc(?!.*?abc)([0-9]+).*?jk
RegEx Demo
Here (?!.*?abc) is negative lookahead that makes sure to match abc where it is NOT followed by another abc thus making sure closes string between abc and jk is matched.
Being non-greedy does not change the rule, that the first match is returned. So abc([0-9]+).*?jk will find the first jk after “abcnumber” rather than the last one, but still match the first “abcnumber”.
One way to solve this is to tell that the dot should not match abc([0-9]+):
abc([0-9]+)((?!abc([0-9]+)).)*jk
If it is not important to have the entire pattern being an exact match you can do it simpler:
.*(abc([0-9]+).*?jk)
In this case, it’s group 1 which contains your intended match. The pattern uses a greedy matchall to ensure that the last possible “abcnumber” is matched within the group.
Assuming that hyphen separates "items", this regex will capture the numbers from the target item:
abc([0-9]+)[^-]*?jk
See demo
I have a list of files in a folder:
maze1.in.txt
maze2.in.txt
maze3.in.txt
I've used substring to remove the .txt extensions.
How do I use regex to match the front and the back of the file name?
I need it to match "maze" at the front and ".in" at the back, and the middle must be a digit (can be single or double digit).
I've tried the following
if (name.matches("name\\din")) {
//dosomething
}
It doesn't match anything. What is the correct regex expression to use?
I'm a little confused what you are asking for in particular
^(maze[0-9]*\.in)$
This will match maze(any number).in
^(maze[0-9]*\.in)\.txt$
this will match maze(any number).in.txt -- excludes the .txt NO NEED FOR USING SUB STRING!
Edit live on Debuggex
The think i would be wary about as of right now is the capture groups... I'm not particularly sure what you are doing with this regex. However, I believe explaining capture groups could benefit you.
A capture group for instance is denoted by () this is basically store them in the pattern array and is a way to parse stuff.
example maze1.in.txt
So if you want to capture the entire line minus .txt i would use this ^(maze[0-9]*\.in\.txt)$
However, if I wanted to capture things separately I would do this ^(maze)([0-9]*)(\.in)\.txt$ this will exclude .txt but include maze, the number, and .in IN separate indexes of the pattern array.
Your original solution doesn't work because string "name" is not in your text. It is "maze".
You can try this
name.matches("maze\\d{1,2}\\.in")
d{1,2} is used to match a digit(can be single or double digit).
You need regex anchors that tell the regex to
start at the beginning: ^
and signal the end of the string: $
^maze[\d]{0,2}\.in$
or in Java:
name.matches("^maze[\\d]{0,2}\\.in$");
Also, your regex wasn't matching strings with a dot (.) which would not accept your examples given. You need to add \. to the regex to accept dots because . is a special character.
It is always good to think of what you are trying to do in english, before you create regular expressions.
You want to match a word maze followed by a digit, followed by a literal period . followed by another word.
word `\w` matches a word character
digit `\d` matches a single digit
period `\.` matches a literal period
word `\w` matches a word character
putting it all together into a single string you get (keep in mind the double backslash for the Java escape and the pluses to repeat the previous match one or more times):
"\\w+\\d\\.\\w+"
The above is the generic case for any file name in the format xxx1.yyy, if you wanted to match maze and in specifically, you can just add those in as literal strings.
"maze\\d+\\.in"
example: http://ideone.com/rS7tw1
name.matches("^maze[0-9]+\\.in\\.txt$")