I was looking at JSON data that was just in a text file. I don't want to do anything aside from just use regex to get the values in between quotes. I'm just using this as a way to help practice regex and got to this point that seems like it should be simple, but it turns out it's not (at least to me and a few other people at the office). I've matched complicated urls with ease in regex so I'm not completely new to regex. This just seems like a weird case for me.
I've tried:
/(?:")(.*?)(?:")/
/"(.*?)"/
and several others but these got me the closest.
Basically we can forget that it's JSON and just say I want to match the words value and stuff out of "value" and "stuff". Everything I try includes the quotes, so I'd have to clean the strings afterwards of the delimiters or else the string is literally "value" with the quotes.
Any help would be much appreciated, whether this is simple or complicated, I'd love to know! Thanks
Update: Alright so I think I'll go with (?<=")(.*?)(?=") and read things by line without the global setting on so I just get the first match on each line. In my code I was just plopping in a huge string into a var in the code instead of actually opening a file with ajax/filereader or having a form setup to input data. I think I'll mark this as solved, much appreciated!
You have two choices to solve this problem:
Use capturing groups
You can match the delimiters and use capturing groups to get the text within. In this case your two regexes will work, but you need to use access capturing group 1 to get the results (demo). See How do you access the matched groups in a JavaScript regular expression? for how to do that.
Use zero-width assertions
You can use zero-width assertions to match only the text within, require delimiters around them without actually matching them (demo):
(?<=")(.*?)(?=")
but now since I'm not consuming the quotes it'll find instances between each quote, not just between pairs of quotes: e.g., a"b"c" would find b and c.
As for getting just the first match, I think that'll happen by default in JavaScript. You'd have to ask for repeated matching before you see the subsequent ones. So if you process your file one line at a time, you should get what you want.
get the values in between quotes
One thing to keep in mind is that valid JSON accepts escaped quotes inside the quoted values. Therefore, the RegEx should take this into account when capturing the groups which is done with the “unrolling-the-loop” pattern.
var pattern = /"[^"\\]*(?:\\.[^"\\]*)*"/g;
var data = {
"value": "This is \"stuff\".",
"empty": "",
"null": null,
"number": 50
};
var dataString = JSON.stringify(data);
console.log(dataString);
var matched = dataString.match(pattern);
matched.map(item => console.log(JSON.parse(item)));
Related
I have this in a javascript/jQuery string (This string is grabbed from an html ($('#shortcode')) elements value which could be changed if user clicks some buttons)
[csvtohtml_create include_rows="1-10"
debug_mode="no" source_type="visualizer_plugin" path="map"
source_files="bundeslander_staple.csv" include cols="1,2,4" exclude cols="3"]
In a textbox (named incl_sc) I have the value:
include cols="2,4"
I want to replace include_cols="1,2,4" from the above string with the value from the textbox.
so basically:
How do I replace include_cols values here? (include_cols="2,4" instead of include_cols="1,2,4") I'm great at many things but regex is not one of them. I guess regex is the thing to use here?
I'm trying this:
var s = $('#shortcode').html();
//I want to replace include cols="1,2,4" exclude cols="3"
//with include_cols="1,2" exclude_cols="3" for example
s.replace('/([include="])[^]*?\1/g', incl_sc.val() );
but I don't get any replacement at all (the string s is same string as $("#shortcode").html(). Obviously I'm doing something really dumb. Please help :-)
In short what you will need is
s.replace(/include cols="[^"]+"/g, incl_sc.val());
There were a couple problems with your code,
To use a regex with String.prototype.replace, you must pass a regex as the first argument, but you were actually passing a string.
This is a regex literal /regex/ while this isn't '/actually a string/'
In the text you supplied in your question include_cols is written as include cols (with a space)
And your regex was formed wrong. I recomend testing them in this website, where you can also learn more if you want.
The code above will replace the part include cols="1,2,3" by whatever is in the textarea, regardless of whats between the quotes (as long it doesn't contain another quote).
First of all I think you need to remove the quotes and fix a little bit the regex.
const r = /(include_cols=\")(.*)(\")/g;
s.replace(r, `$1${incl_sc.val()}$3`)
Basically, I group the first and last part in order to include them at the end of the replacement. You can also avoid create the first and last group and put it literally in the last argument of the replace function, like this:
const r = /include_cols=\"(.*)\"/g;
s.replace(r, `include_cols="${incl_sc.val()}"`)
I have a text box with a bunch of comments, all separated by a specific character string as a means of splitting them to display each comment individually.
The string in question is | but I can change this to accommodate whatever will work. My only requirement is that it is not likely to be a string of characters someone will type in an everyday sentence.
I believe I need to use the split method and possibly some regex but all the other questions I've seen only seem to mention splitting by one character or a number of different characters, not a specific set of characters in a row.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
.split() should work for that purpose:
var comments = "this is a comment|and here is another comment|and yet another one";
var parsedComments = comments.split('|');
This will give you all comments in an array which you can then loop over or do whatever you have to do.
Keep in mind you could also change | to something like <--NEWCOMMENT--> and it will still work fine inside the split('<--NEWCOMMENT-->') method.
Remember that split() removes the character it's splitting on, so your resulting array won't contain any instances of <--NEWCOMMENT-->
There may be a very simple answer to this, probably because of my familiarity (or possibly lack thereof) of the replace method and how it works with regex.
Let's say I have the following string: abcdefHellowxyz
I just want to strip the first six characters and the last four, to return Hello, using regex... Yes, I know there may be other ways, but I'm trying to explore the boundaries of what these methods are capable of doing...
Anyway, I've tinkered on http://regex101.com and got the following Regex worked out:
/^(.{6}).+(.{4})$/
Which seems to pass the string well and shows that abcdef is captured as group 1, and wxyz captured as group 2. But when I try to run the following:
"abcdefHellowxyz".replace(/^(.{6}).+(.{4})$/,"")
to replace those captured groups with "" I receive an empty string as my final output... Am I doing something wrong with this syntax? And if so, how does one correct it, keeping my original stance on wanting to use Regex in this manner...
Thanks so much everyone in advance...
The code below works well as you wish
"abcdefHellowxyz".replace(/^.{6}(.+).{4}$/,"$1")
I think that only use ()to capture the text you want, and in the second parameter of replace(), you can use $1 $2 ... to represent the group1 group2.
Also you can pass a function to the second parameter of replace,and transform the captured text to whatever you want in this function.
For more detail, as #Akxe recommend , you can find document on https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/String/replace.
You are replacing any substring that matches /^(.{6}).+(.{4})$/, with this line of code:
"abcdefHellowxyz".replace(/^(.{6}).+(.{4})$/,"")
The regex matches the whole string "abcdefHellowxyz"; thus, the whole string is replaced. Instead, if you are strictly stripping by the lengths of the extraneous substrings, you could simply use substring or substr.
Edit
The answer you're probably looking for is capturing the middle token, instead of the outer ones:
var str = "abcdefHellowxyz";
var matches = str.match(/^.{6}(.+).{4}$/);
str = matches[1]; // index 0 is entire match
console.log(str);
I'm trying to improve my understanding of Regex, but this one has me quite mystified.
I started with some text defined as:
var txt = "{\"columns\":[{\"text\":\"A\",\"value\":80},{\"text\":\"B\",\"renderer\":\"gbpFormat\",\"value\":80},{\"text\":\"C\",\"value\":80}]}";
and do a replace as follows:
txt.replace(/\"renderer\"\:(.*)(?:,)/g,"\"renderer\"\:gbpFormat\,");
which results in:
"{"columns":[{"text":"A","value":80},{"text":"B","renderer":gbpFormat,"value":80}]}"
What I expected was for the renderer attribute value to have it's quotes removed; which has happened, but also the C column is completely missing! I'd really love for someone to explain how my Regex has removed column C?
As an extra bonus, if you could explain how to remove the quotes around any value for renderer (i.e. so I don't have to hard-code the value gbpFormat in the regex) that'd be fantastic.
You are using a greedy operator while you need a lazy one. Change this:
"renderer":(.*)(?:,)
^---- add here the '?' to make it lazy
To
"renderer":(.*?)(?:,)
Working demo
Your code should be:
txt.replace(/\"renderer\"\:(.*?)(?:,)/g,"\"renderer\"\:gbpFormat\,");
If you are learning regex, take a look at this documentation to know more about greedyness. A nice extract to understand this is:
Watch Out for The Greediness!
Suppose you want to use a regex to match an HTML tag. You know that
the input will be a valid HTML file, so the regular expression does
not need to exclude any invalid use of sharp brackets. If it sits
between sharp brackets, it is an HTML tag.
Most people new to regular expressions will attempt to use <.+>. They
will be surprised when they test it on a string like This is a
first test. You might expect the regex to match and when
continuing after that match, .
But it does not. The regex will match first. Obviously not
what we wanted. The reason is that the plus is greedy. That is, the
plus causes the regex engine to repeat the preceding token as often as
possible. Only if that causes the entire regex to fail, will the regex
engine backtrack. That is, it will go back to the plus, make it give
up the last iteration, and proceed with the remainder of the regex.
Like the plus, the star and the repetition using curly braces are
greedy.
Try like this:
txt = txt.replace(/"renderer":"(.*?)"/g,'"renderer":$1');
The issue in the expression you were using was this part:
(.*)(?:,)
By default, the * quantifier is greedy by default, which means that it gobbles up as much as it can, so it will run up to the last comma in your string. The easiest solution would be to turn that in to a non-greedy quantifier, by adding a question mark after the asterisk and change that part of your expression to look like this
(.*?)(?:,)
For the solution I proposed at the top of this answer, I also removed the part matching the comma, because I think it's easier just to match everything between quotes. As for your bonus question, to replace the matched value instead of having to hardcode gbpFormat, I used a backreference ($1), which will insert the first matched group into the replacement string.
Don't manipulate JSON with regexp. It's too likely that you will break it, as you have found, and more importantly there's no need to.
In addition, once you have changed
'{"columns": [..."renderer": "gbpFormat", ...]}'
into
'{"columns": [..."renderer": gbpFormat, ...]}' // remove quotes from gbpFormat
then this is no longer valid JSON. (JSON requires that property values be numbers, quoted strings, objects, or arrays.) So you will not be able to parse it, or send it anywhere and have it interpreted correctly.
Therefore you should parse it to start with, then manipulate the resulting actual JS object:
var object = JSON.parse(txt);
object.columns.forEach(function(column) {
column.renderer = ghpFormat;
});
If you want to replace any quoted value of the renderer property with the value itself, then you could try
column.renderer = window[column.renderer];
Assuming that the value is available in the global namespace.
This question falls into the category of "I need a regexp, or I wrote one and it's not working, and I'm not really sure why it has to be a regexp, but I heard they can do all kinds of things, so that's just what I imagined I must need." People use regexps to try to do far too many complex matching, splitting, scanning, replacement, and validation tasks, including on complex languages such as HTML, or in this case JSON. There is almost always a better way.
The only time I can imagine wanting to manipulate JSON with regexps is if the JSON is broken somehow, perhaps due to a bug in server code, and it needs to be fixed up in order to be parseable.
I have one string, that looks like this:
a[abcdefghi,2,3,jklmnopqr]
The beginning "a" is fixed and non-changing, however the content within the brackets is and can follow a pattern. It will always be an alphabetical string, possibly followed by numbers separate by commas or more strings and/or numbers.
I'd like to be able to break it into chunks of the string and any numbers that follow it until the "]" or another string is met.
Probably best explained through examples and expected ideal results:
a[abcdefghi] -> "abcdefghi"
a[abcdefghi,2] -> "abcdefghi,2"
a[abcdefghi,2,3,jklmnopqr] -> "abcdefghi,2,3" and "jklmnopqr"
a[abcdefghi,2,3,jklmnopqr,stuvwxyz] -> "abcdefghi,2,3" and "jklmnopqr" and "stuvwxyz"
a[abcdefghi,2,3,jklmnopqr,1,9,stuvwxyz] -> "abcdefghi,2,3" and "jklmnopqr,1,9" and "stuvwxyz"
a[abcdefghi,1,jklmnopqr,2,stuvwxyz,3,4] -> "abcdefghi,1" and "jklmnopqr,2" and "stuvwxyz,3,4"
Ideally a malformed string would be partially caught (but this is a nice extra):
a[2,3,jklmnopqr,1,9,stuvwxyz] -> "jklmnopqr,1,9" and "stuvwxyz"
I'm using Javascript and I realize a regex won't bring me all the way to the solution I'd like but it could be a big help. The alternative is to do a lot of manually string parsing which I can do but doesn't seem like the best answer.
Advice, tips appreciated.
UPDATE: Yes I did mean alphametcial (A-Za-z) instead of alphanumeric. Edited to reflect that. Thanks for letting me know.
You'd probably want to do this in 2 steps. First, match against:
a\[([^[\]]*)\]
and extract group 1. That'll be the stuff in the square brackets.
Next, repeatedly match against:
[a-z]+(,[0-9]+)*
That'll match things like "abcdefghi,2,3". After the first match you'll need to see if the next character is a comma and if so skip over it. (BTW: if you really meant alphanumeric rather than alphabetic like your examples, use [a-z0-9]*[a-z][a-z0-9]* instead of [a-z]+.)
Alternatively, split the string on commas and reassemble into your word with number groups.
Why wouldn't a regex bring you all the way to a solution?
The following regex works against the given data, but it makes a few assumptions (at least two alphas followed by comma separated single digits).
([a-z]{2,}(?:,\\d)*)
Example:
re = new RegExp('[a-z]{2,}(?:,\\d)*', 'g')
matches = re.exec("a[abcdefghi,2,3,jklmnopqr,1,9,stuvwxyz]")
Assuming you can easily break out the string between the brackets, something like this might be what you're after:
> re = new RegExp('[a-z]+(?:,\\d)*(?:,?)', 'gi')
> while (match = re.exec("abcdefghi,2,3,jklmnopqr,1,9,stuvwxyz")) { print(match[0]) }
abcdefghi,2,3,
jklmnopqr,1,9,
stuvwxyz
This has the advantage of working partially in your malformed case:
> while (match = re.exec("abcdefghi,2,3,jklmnopqr,1,9,stuvwxyz")) { print(match[0]) }
jklmnopqr,1,9,
stuvwxy
The first character class [a-z] can be modified if you meant for it to be truly alphanumeric.