New to Regular Expressions need help - javascript

I need a form with one button and window for input
that will check an array, via a regular expression.
And will find a exact match of letters + numbers. Example wxyz [some space btw] 0960000
or a mix of numbers and letters [some space btw] + numbers 01xg [some space btw] 0960000
The array has four objects for now.
Once found i need a function the will open a new page or window when match is found .
Thanks you for your help.
Michael

To answer the Javascript part, here's one way to "grep" through the array to find matching elements:
var matches = [];
var re = /whatever/;
foo.forEach(
function(el) {
if( re.exec(el) )
matches.push(el);
}
);
To attempt to answer the regular expression part: I don't know what "exact match" means to you, and I'm assuming "some space" belongs only in between the other terms, and I'm assuming letters means the English alphabet from 'a' to 'z' in lower and upper case and the digits should be 0-9 (otherwise, other language characters might be matched).
The first pattern would be /[a-zA-Z0-9]+\s*0960000/. Change "\s*" to "\s+" if there is at least one space, instead of zero or more space characters. Change "\s" to " " if matching the tab character (and some lesser-used space chars) is not desirable.
For the second pattern, I don't know what "numbers 01xg" means, but if it means numbers followed by that string, then the pattern would be /[a-zA-Z0-9]+\s*[0-9]+\s*01xg\s*0960000/. The same caveats apply as above.
Additionally, this will match a partial string. If the string much be matched in entirety (if nothing in the string must exist except that which is matched), add "^" to the beginning of the pattern to anchor it to the beginning of the string, and "$" at the end to anchor it to the end of the string. For example, /[a-zA-Z0-9]+\s*0960000/ matches "foo_bar 5 0960000", but /^[a-zA-Z0-9]+\s*0960000$/ does not.
For more on regular expressions in Javascript, take a look at developer.mozilla.org's article on the RegExp object (the link takes you to JS version 1.5 reference, which should apply to all JS-capable browsers).
(edited to add): To match either situation, since they have overlapping parts, you could use the following pattern: /[a-zA-Z0-9]+(?:\s*[0-9]+\s*01xg)?\s*0960000/. The question mark says to match the part that differs -- in a non-matching group (?:foo) -- once or zero times. (?:foo)? and (?:foo|) do the same thing in this case, but I'm not sure whether there is a performance difference; I would recommend to use the one that makes the most sense to you, so you can read it later.

Related

JavaScript: How to remove last word from a string only if the word contains an integer 0-9?

So I'm aware that I can remove the last word from a string of words by using lastIndexOf(" "), but I'd like to add the condition that the word should only be removed if it contains an integer 0-9.
I'm asking because I'd like to separate company names from their reference tags (if such tags exist) for a list of data. These reference tags are guaranteed to contain at least one integer 0-9. For example, I have the string "Cisco Systems RX4510", and I'd like to remove the "RX4510" to just get the company name, "Cisco Systems." However, for another string "Electronic Arts", which has no reference tag, I just leave it alone.
Any help would be appreciated, thanks.
Use a regular expression which, after the last space, looks ahead for a digit character, and then matches word characters until the end of the string, $:
const str1 = 'Cisco Systems RX4510';
const str2 = 'Electronic Arts';
const re = / (?=.*\d)\w+$/;
console.log(str1.replace(re, ''));
console.log(str2.replace(re, ''));
Note that this will replace the space before the last word too. If you want to preserve the last space, use a word boundary instead:
/\b(?=.*\d)\w+$/
You can get the last character with s.charAt(s.length) (there are cleaner ways but this one supports really old browsers) and then check if it's a number with parseInt and isNaN. Example:
if (!isNaN(parseInt(s.charAt(s.length), 10))) {
// do something
}

Regexp: excluding a word but including non-standard punctuation

I want to find strings that contain words in a particular order, allowing non-standard characters in between the words but excluding a particular word or symbol.
I'm using javascript's replace function to find all instances and put into an array.
So, I want select...from, with anything except 'from' in between the words. Or I can separate select...from from select...from (, as long as I exclude nesting. I think the answer is the same for both, i.e. how do I write: find x and not y within the same regexp?
From the internet, I feel this should work: /\bselect\b^(?!from).*\bfrom\b/gi but this finds no matches.
This works to find all select...from: /\bselect\b[0-9a-zA-Z#\(\)\[\]\s\.\*,%_+-]*?\bfrom\b/gi but modifying it to exclude the parenthesis "(" at the end prevents any matches: /\bselect\b[0-9a-zA-Z#\(\)\[\]\s\.\*,%_+-]*?\bfrom\b\s*^\(/gi
Can anyone tell me how to exclude words and symbols within this regexp?
Many thanks
Emma
Edit: partial string input:
left outer join [stage].[db].[table14] o on p.Project_id = o.project_id
left outer join
(
select
different_id
,sum(costs) - ( sum(brushes) + sum(carpets) + sum(fabric) + sum(other) + sum(chairs)+ sum(apples) ) as overallNumber
from
(
select ace from [stage].db.[table18] J
Javascript:
sequel = stringInputAsAbove;
var tst = sequel.replace(/\bselect\b[\s\S]*?\bfrom\b/gi, function(a,b) { console.log('match: '+a); selects.push(b); return a; });
console.log(selects);
Console.log(selects) should print an array of numbers, where each number is the starting character of a select...from. This works for the second regexp I gave in my info, printing: [95, 251]. Your \s\S variation does the same, #stribizhev.
The first example ^(?!from).* should do likewise but returns [].
The third example \s*^\( should return 251 only but returns []. However I have just noticed that the positive expression \s*\( does give 95, so some progress! It's the negatives I'm getting wrong.
Your \bselect\b^(?!from).*\bfrom\b regex doesn't work as expected because:
^ means here beginning of a line, not negation of next part, so
the \bselect\b^ means, select word followed by beginning of a
line. After removal of ^ regex start to match something
(DEMO) but it is still invalid.
in multiline text .* without modification will not match new line,
so regex will match only select...from in single lines, but if you
change it for (.|\n)* (as a simple example) it will match
multiline, but still invalid
the * is greede quantifire, so it will match as much a possible,
but if you use reluctant quantifire *?, regex will match to first
occurance of from word, and int will start to return relativly
correct result.
\bselect\b(?!from) means match separate select word which is not
directly followed by separate from word, so it would be
selectfrom somehow composed of separate words (because
select\bfrom) so (?!from) doesn't work and it is redundant
In effect you will get regex very similar to what Stribizhev gave you: \bselect\b(.|\n)*?\bfrom\b
In third expression you meke same mistake: \bselect\b[0-9a-zA-Z#\(\)\[\]\s\.\*,%_+-]*?\bfrom\b\s*^\( using ^ as (I assume) a negation, not beginning of a line. Remove ^ and you will again get relativly valid result (match from select through from to closing parathesis ) ).
Your second regex works similar to \bselect\b(.|\n)*?\bfrom\b or \bselect\b[\s\S]*?\bfrom\b.
I wrote "relativly valid result", as I also think, that parsing SQL with regex could be very camplicated, so I am not sure if it will work in every case.
You can also try to use positive lookahead to match just position in text, like:
(?=\bselect\b(?:.|\n)*?\bfrom\b)
DEMO - the () was added to regex just to return beginning index of match in groups, so it would be easier to check it validity
Negation in regex
We use ^ as negation in character class, for example [^a-z] means match anything but not letter, so it will match number, symbol, whitespace, etc, but not letter from range a to z (Look here). But this negation is on a level of single character. I you use [^from] it will prevent regex from matching characters f,r,o and m (demo). Also the [^from]{4} will avoid matching from but also form, morf, etc.
To exlude the whole word from matching by regex, you need to use negative look ahead, like (?!from), which will fail to match, if there will be chosen word from fallowing given position. To avoid matching whole line containing from you could use ^(?!.*from.*).+$ (demo).
However in your case, you don't need to use this construction, because if you replace greedy quantifire .*\bfrom with .*?\bfrom it will match to first occurance of this word. Whats more it would couse problems. Take a look on this regex, it will not match anything because (?![\s\S]*from[\s\S]*) is not restricted by anything, so it will match only if there is no from after select, but we want to match also from! in effect this regex try to match and exclude from at once, and fail. so the (?!.*word.*) construction works much better to exclude matching line with given word.
So what to do if we don't what to match a word in a fragment of a match? I think select\b([^f]|f(?!rom))*?\bfrom\b is a good solution. With ([^f]|f(?!rom))*? it will match everything between select and from, but will not exclude from.
But if you would like to match only select...from not followed by ( then it is good idea to use (?!\() like. But in your regex (multiline, use of (.|\n)*? or [\s\S]*? it will cause to match up to next select...from part, because reluctant quantifire will chenge a plece where it need to match to make whole regex . In my opinion, good solution would be to use again:
select\b([^f]|f(?!rom))*?\bfrom\b(?!\s*?\()
which will not overlap additional select..from and will not match if there is \( after select...from - check it here

How to find all words with x (and one or more) occurrences of a letter?

I have an answer to my second question right here:
To find words with one or more occurrences of the letter 'a' in it
var re = /(\w+a)/;
With regards to the above, how does it work? For example,
var re = /(\w+a)/g;
var str = "gamma";
console.log(re.exec(str));
Output:
[ 'gamma', 'gamma', index: 0, input: 'gamma' ]
However; these are not the results I expected (although it IS what I want). That is to say, re should have found patterns such that there were any number of occurrences of \w. Then the first occurrence of the letter 'a'. Then stop.
I.e. I expected: ga.
Then mma
Next, how do I look for words with a pre-defined number of occurrences (call it x) of the letter 'a'. Such that f(x)=gamma iff x=2.
Repetition in regex is greedy. That is it takes as much as possible. You happen to get the full word, because it ends in an a. To make it ungreedy, (stop at the first one), you'd use:
\w+?a
But to actually get the full word, I'd rather use
\w*a\w*
Note the *, otherwise you'll get problems with words that have an a only as the first or last letter.
To get words with exactly 2 a you need to exclude a from the repeated letters. This is best done with a negated character class, that disallows non-word characters and as. In addition you need to make sure, that you get full words. This is easily done with the word boundary \b:
\b[^\Wa]*a[^\Wa]*a[^\Wa]*\b
For more flexibility in terms of the number of repetitions, this can be rewritten as
\b[^\Wa]*(?:a[^\Wa]*){2}\b
Regular expressions are greedy by default. That means that if they can grab more characters they will. You need to consider greed when using quantifiers, like + and *.
To make a quantifier not greedy (lazy) suffix it with a ?.
/(\w+?a)/
You can use regex for something, such as
/\b\w*a\w*\b/ - find a word with at least 1 a (can match the word 'a')
/\b\w*(?:a\w*){2}\b/ - find a word with at least 2 as
But it gets tricky when the amount is exact, because you must change the \w to include all letters except a... works by the negated class, thus
/\b[^\Wa]*(?:a[^\Wa]*){2}\b/ - matches a word with exactly 2 as
To find the syllables or so until the "a" letter, then you can use
/\b(?:[^\Wa]*a)/ - matches ga alone and in gamma
/\b(?:[^\Wa]*a){1,4}/ - matches word having 1-4 a, ending in a.
The easiest way to achieve something like this is however is to match all words /\w+/, and filter them by Javascript.

How to make regex match only first occurrence of each match?

/\b(keyword|whatever)\b/gi
How can I modify the above javascript regex to match only the first occurance of each word (I believe this is called non-greedy)?
First occurance of "keyword" and first occurance of "whatever" and I may put more more words in there.
Remove g flag from your regex:
/\b(keyword|whatever)\b/i
What you're doing is simply unachievable with a singular regular expression. Instead you will have to store every word you wish to find in an array, loop through them all searching for an answer, and then for any matches, store the result in an array.
Example:
var words = ["keyword","whatever"];
var text = "Whatever, keywords are like so, whatever... Unrelated, I now know " +
"what it's like to be a tweenage girl. Go Edward.";
var matches = []; // An empty array to store results in.
/* When you search the text you need to convert it to lower case to make it
searchable.
* We'll be using the built in method 'String.indexOf(needle)' to match
the strings as it avoids the need to escape the input for regular expression
metacharacters. */
//Text converted to lower case to allow case insensitive searchable.
var lowerCaseText = text.toLowerCase();
for (var i=0;i<words.length;i++) { //Loop through the `words` array
//indexOf returns -1 if no match is found
if (lowerCaseText.indexOf(words[i]) != -1)
matches.push(words[i]); //Add to the `matches` array
}
Remove the g modifier from your regex. Then it will find only one match.
What you're talking about can't be done with a JavaScript regex. It might be possible with advanced regex features like .NET's unrestricted lookbehind, but JavaScript's feature set is extremely limited. And even in .NET, it would probably be simplest to create a separate regex for each word and apply them one by one; in JavaScript it's your only option.
Greediness only applies to regexes that employ quantifiers, like /START.*END/. The . means "any character" and the * means "zero or more". After the START is located, the .* greedily consumes the rest of the text. Then it starts backtracking, "giving back" one character at a time until the next part of the regex, END succeeds in matching.
We call this regex "greedy" because it matches everything from the first occurrence of START to the last occurrence of END.
If there may be more than one "START"-to-"END" sequence, and you want to match just the first one, you can append a ? to the * to make it non-greedy: /START.*?END/. Now, each time the . tries to consume the next character, it first checks to see if it could match END at that spot instead. Thus it matches from the first START to the first END after that. And if you want to match all the "START"-to-"END" sequences individually, you add the 'g' modifier: /START.*?END/g.
It's a bit more complicated than that, of course. For example, what if these sequences can be nested, as in START…START…END…END? If I've gotten a little carried away with this answer, it's because understanding greediness is the first important step to mastering regexes. :-/

JavaScript and regular expressions: get the number of parenthesized subpattern

I have to get the number of parenthesized substring matches in a regular expression:
var reg=/([A-Z]+?)(?:[a-z]*)(?:\([1-3]|[7-9]\))*([1-9]+)/g,
nbr=0;
//Some code
alert(nbr); //2
In the above example, the total is 2: only the first and the last couple of parentheses will create grouping matches.
How to know this number for any regular expressions?
My first idea was to check the value of RegExp.$1 to RegExp.$9, but even if there are no corresponding parenthseses, these values are not null, but empty string...
I've also seen the RegExp.lastMatch property, but this one represents only the value of the last matched characters, not the corresponding number.
So, I've tried to build another regular expression to scan any RegExp and count this number, but it's quite difficult...
Do you have a better solution to do that?
Thanks in advance!
Javascripts RegExp.match() method returns an Array of matches. You might just want to check the length of that result array.
var mystr = "Hello 42 world. This 11 is a string 105 with some 2 numbers 55";
var res = mystr.match(/\d+/g);
console.log( res.length );
Well, judging from the code snippet we can assume that the input pattern is always a valid regular expression, because otherwise it would fail before the some code partm right? That makes the task much easier!
Because We just need to count how many starting capturing parentheses there are!
var reg = /([A-Z]+?)(?:[a-z]*)(?:\([1-3]|[7-9]\))*([1-9]+)/g;
var nbr = (' '+reg.source).match(/[^\\](\\\\)*(?=\([^?])/g);
nbr = nbr ? nbr.length : 0;
alert(nbr); // 2
And here is a breakdown:
[^\\] Make sure we don't start the match with an escaping slash.
(\\\\)* And we can have any number of escaped slash before the starting parenthes.
(?= Look ahead. More on this later.
\( The starting parenthes we are looking for.
[^?] Make sure it is not followed by a question mark - which means it is capturing.
) End of look ahead
Why match with look ahead? To check that the parenthes is not an escaped entity, we need to capture what goes before it. No big deal here. We know JS doens't have look behind.
Problem is, if there are two starting parentheses sticking together, then once we capture the first parenthes the second parenthes would have nothing to back it up - its back has already been captured!
So to make sure a parenthes can be the starting base of the next one, we need to exclude it from the match.
And the space added to the source? It is there to be the back of the first character, in case it is a starting parenthes.

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