Let's say I have a string: "This is a string-thing". I want to split on both space and hyphen, but keep the separators together with the previous word => ["This ", "is ", "a ", "string-", "thing"]
I'm currently doing this using the following regExp:
string.split(/(?<=[\s-])/g)
This does what is supposed to.. at least in Chrome. As I understand Safari doesn't support lookbehind in regExp which breaks the code. Is there any way to do this without lookbehind?
You could match the words without lookbehind.
const
string = "This is a string-thing",
parts = string.match(/.+?([\s-]|$)/g);
console.log(parts);
You might also use split with a capture group to keep the value to split on, and remove the empty entries from the resulting array.
The pattern matches
( Capture group 1
[^\s-]* Repeat 0+ times matching any char other than a whitespace char or -
[\s-] Match either a whitespace char or -
) Close group 1
Note that \s can also match a newline.
const s = "This is a string-thing";
const regex = /([^\s-]*[\s-])/;
console.log(s.split(regex).filter(Boolean));
I have got this string {bgRed Please run a task, {red a list has been provided below}, I need to do a string replace to remove the braces and also the first word.
So below I would want to remove {bgRed and {red and then the trailing brace which I can do separate.
I have managed to create this regex, but it is only matching {bgRed and not {red, can someone lend a hand?
/^\{.+?(?=\s)/gm
Note you are using ^ anchor at the start and that makes your pattern only match at the start of a line (mind also the m modifier). .+?(?=\s|$) is too cumbersome, you want to match any 1+ chars up to the first whitespace or end of string, use {\S+ (or {\S* if you plan to match { without any non-whitespace chars after it).
You may use
s = s.replace(/{\S*|}/g, '')
You may trim the outcome to get rid of resulting leading/trailing spaces:
s = s.replace(/{\S*|}/g, '').trim()
See the regex demo and the regex graph:
Details
{\S* - { char followed with 0 or more non-whitespace characters
| - or
} - a } char.
If the goal is go to from
"{bgRed Please run a task, {red a list has been provided below}"
to
"Please run a task, a list has been provided below"
a regex with two capture groups seems simplest:
const original = "{bgRed Please run a task, {red a list has been provided below}";
const rex = /\{\w+ ([^{]+)\{\w+ ([^}]+)}/g;
const result = original.replace(rex, "$1$2");
console.log(result);
\{\w+ ([^{]+)\{\w+ ([^}]+)} is:
\{ - a literal {
\w+ - one or more word characters ("bgRed")
a literal space
([^{]+) one or more characters that aren't {, captured to group 1
\{ - another literal {
\w+ - one or more word characters ("red")
([^}]+) - one or more characters that aren't }, captured to group 2
} - a literal }
The replacement uses $1 and $2 to swap in the capture group contents.
I'm a regular expression newbie and I can't quite figure out how to write a single regular expression that would "match" any duplicate consecutive words such as:
Paris in the the spring.
Not that that is related.
Why are you laughing? Are my my regular expressions THAT bad??
Is there a single regular expression that will match ALL of the bold strings above?
Try this regular expression:
\b(\w+)\s+\1\b
Here \b is a word boundary and \1 references the captured match of the first group.
Regex101 example here
I believe this regex handles more situations:
/(\b\S+\b)\s+\b\1\b/
A good selection of test strings can be found here: http://callumacrae.github.com/regex-tuesday/challenge1.html
The below expression should work correctly to find any number of duplicated words. The matching can be case insensitive.
String regex = "\\b(\\w+)(\\s+\\1\\b)+";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile(regex, Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
Matcher m = p.matcher(input);
// Check for subsequences of input that match the compiled pattern
while (m.find()) {
input = input.replaceAll(m.group(0), m.group(1));
}
Sample Input : Goodbye goodbye GooDbYe
Sample Output : Goodbye
Explanation:
The regex expression:
\b : Start of a word boundary
\w+ : Any number of word characters
(\s+\1\b)* : Any number of space followed by word which matches the previous word and ends the word boundary. Whole thing wrapped in * helps to find more than one repetitions.
Grouping :
m.group(0) : Shall contain the matched group in above case Goodbye goodbye GooDbYe
m.group(1) : Shall contain the first word of the matched pattern in above case Goodbye
Replace method shall replace all consecutive matched words with the first instance of the word.
Try this with below RE
\b start of word word boundary
\W+ any word character
\1 same word matched already
\b end of word
()* Repeating again
public static void main(String[] args) {
String regex = "\\b(\\w+)(\\b\\W+\\b\\1\\b)*";// "/* Write a RegEx matching repeated words here. */";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile(regex, Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE/* Insert the correct Pattern flag here.*/);
Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
int numSentences = Integer.parseInt(in.nextLine());
while (numSentences-- > 0) {
String input = in.nextLine();
Matcher m = p.matcher(input);
// Check for subsequences of input that match the compiled pattern
while (m.find()) {
input = input.replaceAll(m.group(0),m.group(1));
}
// Prints the modified sentence.
System.out.println(input);
}
in.close();
}
Regex to Strip 2+ duplicate words (consecutive/non-consecutive words)
Try this regex that can catch 2 or more duplicate words and only leave behind one single word. And the duplicate words need not even be consecutive.
/\b(\w+)\b(?=.*?\b\1\b)/ig
Here, \b is used for Word Boundary, ?= is used for positive lookahead, and \1 is used for back-referencing.
Example
Source
The widely-used PCRE library can handle such situations (you won't achieve the the same with POSIX-compliant regex engines, though):
(\b\w+\b)\W+\1
Here is one that catches multiple words multiple times:
(\b\w+\b)(\s+\1)+
No. That is an irregular grammar. There may be engine-/language-specific regular expressions that you can use, but there is no universal regular expression that can do that.
This is the regex I use to remove duplicate phrases in my twitch bot:
(\S+\s*)\1{2,}
(\S+\s*) looks for any string of characters that isn't whitespace, followed whitespace.
\1{2,} then looks for more than 2 instances of that phrase in the string to match. If there are 3 phrases that are identical, it matches.
Since some developers are coming to this page in search of a solution which not only eliminates duplicate consecutive non-whitespace substrings, but triplicates and beyond, I'll show the adapted pattern.
Pattern: /(\b\S+)(?:\s+\1\b)+/ (Pattern Demo)
Replace: $1 (replaces the fullstring match with capture group #1)
This pattern greedily matches a "whole" non-whitespace substring, then requires one or more copies of the matched substring which may be delimited by one or more whitespace characters (space, tab, newline, etc).
Specifically:
\b (word boundary) characters are vital to ensure partial words are not matched.
The second parenthetical is a non-capturing group, because this variable width substring does not need to be captured -- only matched/absorbed.
the + (one or more quantifier) on the non-capturing group is more appropriate than * because * will "bother" the regex engine to capture and replace singleton occurrences -- this is wasteful pattern design.
*note if you are dealing with sentences or input strings with punctuation, then the pattern will need to be further refined.
The example in Javascript: The Good Parts can be adapted to do this:
var doubled_words = /([A-Za-z\u00C0-\u1FFF\u2800-\uFFFD]+)\s+\1(?:\s|$)/gi;
\b uses \w for word boundaries, where \w is equivalent to [0-9A-Z_a-z]. If you don't mind that limitation, the accepted answer is fine.
This expression (inspired from Mike, above) seems to catch all duplicates, triplicates, etc, including the ones at the end of the string, which most of the others don't:
/(^|\s+)(\S+)(($|\s+)\2)+/g, "$1$2")
I know the question asked to match duplicates only, but a triplicate is just 2 duplicates next to each other :)
First, I put (^|\s+) to make sure it starts with a full word, otherwise "child's steak" would go to "child'steak" (the "s"'s would match). Then, it matches all full words ((\b\S+\b)), followed by an end of string ($) or a number of spaces (\s+), the whole repeated more than once.
I tried it like this and it worked well:
var s = "here here here here is ahi-ahi ahi-ahi ahi-ahi joe's joe's joe's joe's joe's the result result result";
print( s.replace( /(\b\S+\b)(($|\s+)\1)+/g, "$1"))
--> here is ahi-ahi joe's the result
Try this regular expression it fits for all repeated words cases:
\b(\w+)\s+\1(?:\s+\1)*\b
I think another solution would be to use named capture groups and backreferences like this:
.* (?<mytoken>\w+)\s+\k<mytoken> .*/
OR
.*(?<mytoken>\w{3,}).+\k<mytoken>.*/
Kotlin:
val regex = Regex(""".* (?<myToken>\w+)\s+\k<myToken> .*""")
val input = "This is a test test data"
val result = regex.find(input)
println(result!!.groups["myToken"]!!.value)
Java:
var pattern = Pattern.compile(".* (?<myToken>\\w+)\\s+\\k<myToken> .*");
var matcher = pattern.matcher("This is a test test data");
var isFound = matcher.find();
var result = matcher.group("myToken");
System.out.println(result);
JavaScript:
const regex = /.* (?<myToken>\w+)\s+\k<myToken> .*/;
const input = "This is a test test data";
const result = regex.exec(input);
console.log(result.groups.myToken);
// OR
const regex = /.* (?<myToken>\w+)\s+\k<myToken> .*/g;
const input = "This is a test test data";
const result = [...input.matchAll(regex)];
console.log(result[0].groups.myToken);
All the above detect the test as the duplicate word.
Tested with Kotlin 1.7.0-Beta, Java 11, Chrome and Firefox 100.
You can use this pattern:
\b(\w+)(?:\W+\1\b)+
This pattern can be used to match all duplicated word groups in sentences. :)
Here is a sample util function written in java 17, which replaces all duplications with the first occurrence:
public String removeDuplicates(String input) {
var regex = "\\b(\\w+)(?:\\W+\\1\\b)+";
var pattern = Pattern.compile(regex, Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
var matcher = pattern.matcher(input);
while (matcher.find()) {
input = input.replaceAll(matcher.group(), matcher.group(1));
}
return input;
}
As far as I can see, none of these would match:
London in the
the winter (with the winter on a new line )
Although matching duplicates on the same line is fairly straightforward,
I haven't been able to come up with a solution for the situation in which they
stretch over two lines. ( with Perl )
To find duplicate words that have no leading or trailing non whitespace character(s) other than a word character(s), you can use whitespace boundaries on the left and on the right making use of lookarounds.
The pattern will have a match in:
Paris in the the spring.
Not that that is related.
The pattern will not have a match in:
This is $word word
(?<!\S)(\w+)\s+\1(?!\S)
Explanation
(?<!\S) Negative lookbehind, assert not a non whitespace char to the left of the current location
(\w+) Capture group 1, match 1 or more word characters
\s+ Match 1 or more whitespace characters (note that this can also match a newline)
\1 Backreference to match the same as in group 1
(?!\S) Negative lookahead, assert not a non whitespace char to the right of the current location
See a regex101 demo.
To find 2 or more duplicate words:
(?<!\S)(\w+)(?:\s+\1)+(?!\S)
This part of the pattern (?:\s+\1)+ uses a non capture group to repeat 1 or more times matching 1 or more whitespace characters followed by the backreference to match the same as in group 1.
See a regex101 demo.
Alternatives without using lookarounds
You could also make use of a leading and trailing alternation matching either a whitespace char or assert the start/end of the string.
Then use a capture group 1 for the value that you want to get, and use a second capture group with a backreference \2 to match the repeated word.
Matching 2 duplicate words:
(?:\s|^)((\w+)\s+\2)(?:\s|$)
See a regex101 demo.
Matching 2 or more duplicate words:
(?:\s|^)((\w+)(?:\s+\2)+)(?:\s|$)
See a regex101 demo.
Use this in case you want case-insensitive checking for duplicate words.
(?i)\\b(\\w+)\\s+\\1\\b
I need is the last match. In the case below the word test without the $ signs or any other special character:
Test String:
$this$ $is$ $a$ $test$
Regex:
\b(\w+)\b
The $ represents the end of the string, so...
\b(\w+)$
However, your test string seems to have dollar sign delimiters, so if those are always there, then you can use that instead of \b.
\$(\w+)\$$
var s = "$this$ $is$ $a$ $test$";
document.body.textContent = /\$(\w+)\$$/.exec(s)[1];
If there could be trailing spaces, then add \s* before the end.
\$(\w+)\$\s*$
And finally, if there could be other non-word stuff at the end, then use \W* instead.
\b(\w+)\W*$
In some cases a word may be proceeded by non-word characters, for example, take the following sentence:
Marvelous Marvin Hagler was a very talented boxer!
If we want to match the word boxer all previous answers will not suffice due the fact we have an exclamation mark character proceeding the word. In order for us to ensure a successful capture the following expression will suffice and in addition take into account extraneous whitespace, newlines and any non-word character.
[a-zA-Z]+?(?=\s*?[^\w]*?$)
https://regex101.com/r/D3bRHW/1
We are informing upon the following:
We are looking for letters only, either uppercase or lowercase.
We will expand only as necessary.
We leverage a positive lookahead.
We exclude any word boundary.
We expand that exclusion,
We assert end of line.
The benefit here are that we do not need to assert any flags or word boundaries, it will take into account non-word characters and we do not need to reach for negate.
var input = "$this$ $is$ $a$ $test$";
If you use var result = input.match("\b(\w+)\b") an array of all the matches will be returned next you can get it by using pop() on the result or by doing: result[result.length]
Your regex will find a word, and since regexes operate left to right it will find the first word.
A \w+ matches as many consecutive alphanumeric character as it can, but it must match at least 1.
A \b matches an alphanumeric character next to a non-alphanumeric character. In your case this matches the '$' characters.
What you need is to anchor your regex to the end of the input which is denoted in a regex by the $ character.
To support an input that may have more than just a '$' character at the end of the line, spaces or a period for instance, you can use \W+ which matches as many non-alphanumeric characters as it can:
\$(\w+)\W+$
Avoid regex - use .split and .pop the result. Use .replace to remove the special characters:
var match = str.split(' ').pop().replace(/[^\w\s]/gi, '');
DEMO
regex:
/#([\S]*?(?=\s)(?!\. ))/g
given string:
'this string has #var.thing.me two strings to be #var. replaced'.replace(/#([\S]*?(?=\s)(?!\. ))/g,function(){return '7';})
expected result:
'this string has 7 two strings to be 7. replaced'
In case you want to make it "better" I'm trying to match Razor Html Encoded Expressions but mind the case about not matching an ending period followed by a space. The test case above shows that with the second (shorter) #var, whereas the first captures as #var.thing.me
Try with following regex:
var input = 'this string has #var.thing.me two strings to be #var. replaced';
input.replace(/(#[a-z][a-z.]+[a-z])/gi, function(){
return '7';
});
This regex (#[a-z]([a-z.]+[a-z])*) matches #, then letter (in case there cannot be dot after #), then letters or dot and letter again at the end.
i modificator allows makes regex case-insensitive.
Your pattern is not restrictive enough i.e., it captures too much. The last #var. (including the dot) in your example string is captured because it is followed by a space (as required by the positive lookahead) which, in addition, is not followed by a dot and a space (as required by the negative lookahead). You can try this pattern:
/#([\S]*?)(?=[.]?\s)/g
It will match the #something substring (which can contain dot characters) both when it is followed by a space (as it happens in the first match of your string) and when it is followed by a dot and a space (as it happens in the second match of your string). Testing it in the chromium browser console it seems to work fine:
> 'this string has #var.thing.me two strings to be #var. replaced'.replace(/#([\S]*?)(?=[.]?\s)/g,function(){return '7';})
"this string has 7 two strings to be 7. replaced"
Try this
#((?!\. )\S)+
See it here at regexr
This matches a # followed by non whitespace characters \S. But it matches the next non whitespace only, if it is not a dot followed by a space. This is ensured by the negative lookahead assertion (?!\. ) before the \S.