Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with regex

Help with a Find/Replace in Word

agent99 — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:52:02 -0800

I’m at the end of my rope trying to figure out how to write a find/replace expression in MS Word (syntax is similar to regex) I need to turn this:

[xv][#AuthorA:2001] text text text text text [123][#AuthorB:2000] text text text text [456-78][#AuthorC:1999]

into this:

{AuthorA:2001@xv} text text text text text {AuthorB:2000@123} text text text text {AuthorC:1999@456-78}

Searching for \[(*}\]\[#(*)\] and replacing with \{\2\@\1\} doesn’t work (the search isn’t specific enough and will match "[xy][#AuthorA:2001] text text text text [123]" which screws up the replace).

Can anyone help me figure this out? Alternately, is there any kind of expression builder that could help with this? I am very much not a programmer of any kind. THANKS!

Problem with regex order

ReiToei — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:03:11 -0800

RegExFilter: Can any regular expression ninjas help me with my this teensy problem? I'm validating an input in cakephp as follow:

'rule' => array('custom', '/^[a-zA-Z\'&.\s]{1,40}$/')

It works great in that it allows letters, spaces, ampersand, apostrophe, period and numbers.

For example: Jim's Number 1 Tackle & Rod Shop. validates.

The problem arises when there is a number first, for example 2you delivery services will not validate.

I know it has something to do with the order in which the expression is written, but I can't figure it out. Anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks, as always.

Regex woes.

Jezztek — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:27:29 -0800

Not quite getting how mod_rewrite regex works when flatting urls with multiple variables. Hello hello,

Ok, so I'm working on another website but I have run into what I'm sure is a pretty basic problem that I can't seem to wrap my head around. I use mod_rewrite pretty frequently to flatten the most basic types of dynamic urls, those with only one variable. But now I need to figure out how to configure my htaccess to handle urls that always have one variable, but sometimes also have 2-3.

Now if I knew the same number of variables would be present all the time I think I could handle it, but when there is a variable number of variables I just can't seem to figure out what I'm doing.

Here is an example of what I do know how to do. Let's say I want to change the url:

http://mywebsite.com/profile/jeremy/

into:

http://mywebsite.com/profile.php?name=jeremy

I'd use:

ReWriteRule ^profile/([A-Za-z]+)/$ /profile.php?name=$1

but if sometimes I also add extra variables like so:

http://mywebsite.com/profile/jeremy/action/sort/order/desc/

into:

http://mywebsite.com/profile.php?name=jeremy&action=sort&order=desc

Then I just can't seem to wrap my head around it. Especially if depending on circumstances I might have urls like so where the 2nd variable in the previous example is missing, but the third is still round:

http://mywebsite.com/profile/jeremy/order/desc/

I've Googled around but it seems most websites toughing on the subject are either too simple (and just give examples with single variables) or are too complicated and assume I already have abase level of regex knowledge which I sadly lack.

So would any kindly Mefite want to give me a walk through on what exactly I should be trying to do (and most importantly why, so that I can avoid just rote copy/pasting and instead be able to solve these kind of problems myself in the future =)

Thanks much!
Jeremy

Idiot proof RegEx creator tool ?

jmnugent — Mon, 12 May 2008 03:47:22 -0800

How can I find a drop-dead simple way of creating Regular Expression strings without having to learn all the underlying mechanics? I've been trying over the past 6months or so to get over my (apparent) mental block understanding Regular Expressions. Sadly, I havent really made any progress at all. Its still migraine-inducing (literally). I dont understand why someone hasnt created a software tool, such that I can drop in a text-string, and it will generate the regular expression I need.

At my job, I occasionally have to update our Spam filter. To accomplish this, I'm asked to visually/manually filter through our spam box, find the popular new trend in spam subject lines or body text. Ok, I can handle this no problem. Next, I'm supposed to create regular expressions from those strings, and update our spam filter to include those new strings. This is the part that has me totally and completely frustrated.

Every regular expression tool I'm finding on the internet seems to be focused on finding patterns in CODE, and not spam. Others that I try dont seem to be producing the results I want. For example, I found this regex creator, but when I feed two different strings into it (see below) I get the same regex output which doesnt seem right:

Earn a degree --> (\w{4}\s+\w\s+\w+)
your length easily --> (\w{4}\s+\w\s+\w+)

I'm obviously not understanding regular expressions. And honestly, I dont really want (or have the time) to understand the mechanics underneath it. All I want is a tool that I can input text-strings, and the output is a regular expression I can add to my spam filter. Yes, I realize this is somewhat of a sophomoric / whiny request ("I want someone/thing else to do all the work for me!!!")... but thats really not my attitude.

Alternatively, if someone could suggest an online link, book or some other resource that would CLEARLY explain regular expressions in a way a non-coder can understand, I'd be super ecstatic to read it. But so far (along with all my other attempts to learn coding) I havent yet found any resource like that.

Powerfull search and replace software?

domi_p — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:57:27 -0800

[Search/replace filter] Is there a free (or really cheap) software that would let me do a batch search and replace where the name of the file is used as pasted text? I have about 300 html files.

I want to add a string of text in the file that would include the first 3 characters of the name of the file.

For example :
in the file 100_xxx.xxx I want to add a string that would go :
a href="zzzzzzzzzz?100" blabla /a

I found a lot of software that do complex search and replace, but none that lets you use the name of the file.

I could start by adding the link with my current search/replace software, and use some variable in place of the numbers, so I'd need something like : find variable, replace with (first 3 char of file name)

If the (first 3 characters) part is too hard, I could also settle for the full name, and I'd search/delete the last part of the name, since there is only about 10 variations of the ending part.

Additional difficulty : these files are in UNIX and they need to stay that way (else i have to manually open each one and convert them), so I'd need a program that wont encode them in DOS format. And I only have access to a Windows machine.

Does anyone know about such a software?

I'm guessing that there might be a way to do it with regular expressions, but I only know the basic concept of it, and I have no idea 'where' you do the regex. I'd have to install PHP? Perl? I have minimal knowledge of PHP, none of Perl.

I'm starting to wonder which would be faster : learning a new language and regex or just manually editing these 300 files. Ok, to be honest, I think I already spent more time trying to find that software than what it would have taken me to edit them manually...

Thanks for your help!

And you might have guessed, English isn't my main language, so please forgive mistakes

Regex Alms for the Perl-less?

ChasFile — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 02:12:28 -0800

Help me composite some regex. (That phrasing makes this question sound way less nerdy than it is) Here's a regex to find some stuff between square brackets:
/\[[^\]]+\]/

Here's one that finds something like Alt: or alt. or Alternative: or alternate or Alternate: or Alternative or Alt.: or you get the idea [note it ends with \s+; it is important for my application that the "Alt___ " I'm testing for has white space at the end, and that I test for it. In the final answer we can test for that word boundary any way we like, we just need to make sure that we do.]:
/(A|a)lt(\.|ernat(e|ive))?:?\s+/

So what I need is a regular expression for "stuff between square brackets where the first thing inside the brackets will NOT match the second regex." Or "Stuff inside square brackets that begins with anything BUT alt or Alt. or Alternate or alternative: or alt.: or etc. etc.

I feel like this should be easy, but I never bothered to totally and completely grok regex, and obviously I'm hurting now because of it. I'd very much appreciate any help anyone could give, and in exchange you'll get co-author credit for the amazing piece of software that this thing will ultimately be a part of! ;-)

I'd like to redirect an entire directory to one specific file.

Tuwa — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 20:10:18 -0800

301 redirectrs in .htaccess: how do I redirect calendar/* to /calendar.html ? I've tried modifying various examples online and they result in either "internal server error" or a 404 caused by incorrectly redirecting /calendar/* to /calendar.html/* . Two examples from the experimentation (I'm in over my head; I just want this to work):

# redirect 301 /calendar http://www.domain.com/calendar.html
# 404 due to mistake above.

# RedirectMatch 301 ^/calendar/(.*).htm$ http://www.domain.com/calendar.html [L]
# internal server error

Regex question

pealco — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 11:52:29 -0800

What's a regular expression to match and replace space characters between curly braces with under scores? In other words, turn something like:

blah blah blah {blah blah blah} blah

into:

blah blah blah blah_blah_blah blah

There can be any number of words between the curly braces.

REGEXpert help needed!

Tubes — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 10:45:42 -0800

Regex experts: I need a regular expression to help trim some lines in a text file. I haven't done regex in some time and I'm not having any luck with this. Hope it'll be easy for a wiz. I have a text file with almost 3,000 e-mail addresses. The format per line is supposed to be:
[address], [name]

But many are:
[address], [address]

The system I'm importing to will not allow two addresses on a line, so I have to trim those instances to simply be:
[address]

Regex Heck

teaperson — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 15:06:39 -0800

Could someone please help me make my php regex less greedy? I need to insert code for an onclick event into the midst of a bunch of tags, and can't get it to work. Here's the code I have:
$teaser = preg_replace("", "$1 code insertion",$teaser);
Any changes I could think of produce errors.

PHP is the only programming language I have access to.

Regex assistance for htaccess puzzle.

ao4047 — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 16:16:48 -0800

Regex assistant for redirecting affiliate links. Currently my affiliate links are structured like:

http://ecommercesystem.com/app/aftrack.asp?afid=123456&u=mysalespage.com

Where '123456' is a multiple digit affiliate ID and the u variable is where the ecommerce system sends the referred user after they are tagged by the affiliate system.

I'd like to make it easier for my affiliates to be able to create affiliate links in the form:

http://myssite.com/aff/123456/ppp

Where ppp is a multi-letter product code that tells which salespage to send to. I could have multiple lines in the htaccess for each product code 'aaa', 'cat', 'dog', etc. Hopefully this can be done with a polite 301 redirect.

Thanks!

Use a regular expression to parse a directory tree

toomuch — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 11:25:49 -0800

I'm trying to write a regex that gets passed into a java class to validate that a file is in a certain directory structure. Okay folks here's the deal. I have a closed source java class with a method that will tell me if a particular web resource is in one of it's predefined directory structures. The directory structures are defined as regular expressions in an XML file like this:

/var/www/.*
/home/user1/www/.*

I pass in the real path to a published jsp or some other file like this one:

/home/user1/www/test.jsp

and this method should return true if the file is in one of it's configured directory structures.

I'm trying to write a regular expression that will match all files/directories in the /home file tree except for a single user. Something like:

/home/.*
/home/^user2

but i want it in a single regular expression. That way if i pass in /home/user1/test.jsp I get a true but if I pass in /home/user2/test.jsp I get a false. I've been toying with something like "/home/[.*&&[^(user2/.*)]]" but it doesn't work. Hopefully that makes sense. Anyone, anyone?

Modifying php-based web calendar to allow UTF-8 (Japanese) input

planetkyoto — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 22:19:23 -0800

Probably easy question about PHP and unicode (UTF-8) and RegEx. I'm trying to modify a php webcalendar (VTcalendar) to allow Japanese text in calendar postings. I've found all the variables to get the UTF-8 headers, and so japanese text manually inserted into pages appears fine. But, there's an input validation thingy I don't know how to modify. (short snippet inside) The calendar item input form rejects any Japanese text, and I think I've traced it to the file "inputvalidation.inc.php" which starts with the code below. if I try to delete the part about allowable characters in line 7, I get an error about the '^' in the last line. can this be modified to allow UTF-8 characters?

if (!defined("ALLOWINCLUDES")) { exit; } // prohibits direct calling of include files
define("constValidTextCharWithoutSpacesRegEx",'\w~!@#\$%^&*\-+=\{\}\[\]\|\\\:";\'<>?,.\/');
define("constValidTextCharWithSpacesRegEx",'\s'.constValidTextCharWithoutSpacesRegEx);
define("constCalendaridMAXLENGTH",20);
define("constCalendaridVALIDMESSAGE", '1 to '.constCalendaridMAXLENGTH.' characters (A-Z,a-z,0-9,-,.)');
define("constCalendarnameMAXLENGTH",100);
define("constCalendarnameVALIDMESSAGE", '1 to '.constCalendarnameMAXLENGTH.' characters (A-Z,a-z,0-9,-,.,&,\',[space],[comma])');
define("constCalendarTitleMAXLENGTH",50);
define("constKeywordMaxLength",100);
define("constSpecificsponsorMaxLength",100);
define("constPasswordMaxLength",20);
define("constPasswordRegEx", '/^['.constValidTextCharWithoutSpacesRegEx.']{1,'.constPasswordMaxLength.'}$/');

Regex: Text from HTML, no attributes

ph00dz — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 19:15:47 -0800

Regex Madness...filter. How do I pull the text out of an html document without looking at the tag attributes? I'm using javascript... and I am just stuck. I think my brain is about to explode.

I'm trying to pull certain things out of an html document. Let's say, for simplicity's sake, it looks like this... 'cept with html tags. (Had to change 'em to display here.)



[!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"]

[html]

  [head]

  [meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1250"]

  [meta name="generator" content="PSPad editor, www.pspad.com"]

  [title]Sample Document[/title]

  [/head]

  [body]

    [p]

      [img src="http://blah.com/sample.jpg"]

    [/p]

    [p]

      Some text is [a href="fjkj.html"]here[/a]

    [/p]

  [/body]

[/html]

All I want out of that thing is:
Sample Document
Some text is
here

Is that possible? I thought I had something working... but I was so wrong.

I tried to spider down through the dom, but I never could get that right either.

As a bonus... is there a particular book/tutorial folks recommend for understandings the mighty regex?

Recursive Regex Fun?

PuGZ — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 16:31:07 -0800

Regexfilter: I'm using PHP and I want to match HTML span classes recursively/in a hierarchy. Help/pointers would be much appreciated. Example string:

<span class="heading">This is</span><span class="bodytext">not a heading.</span>

I can match a string like this just fine using this regex: <span class=\"(.*?)\">(.*?)</span> in preg_match_all. What I want to do is return a multi-dimensional array in case of nested spans, which currently confuse the hell out of my code (and me!). For example:

<span class="heading">This <span class="shiny"> is a</span> lovely heading</span>&span class="bodytext">bla bla.</span>

Thanks a million and one to all those that can help. :-)

Regular expressions to describe incoming search engine URLs?

WCityMike — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 09:56:13 -0800

HtAccessFilter: I’m seeking regular expressions to describe URLs that encompass search engines’ image and video search engines, but not the engines themselves, so that I can block said image and video search engines using “SetEnvIfNoCase Referer” in .htaccess. Also, I’m also seeking to block all incoming requests for one particular URL which is popular with these video and image search engines but which no longer exists – but I don’t want to serve them the normal 404. To be specific, I’m seeking to block most image and video search engines from my website, while not excluding the main search engines themselves (e.g., I want Google Images and all its regional variations blocked, but not Google itself; Yahoo Video Search, but not Yahoo; etc.). I managed to get a good variation for Google Images:

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^https?://(www\.)?images.google.(ae|at|be|ca|ch|cl|co\.hu|co\.il|co\.in|co\.jp|co\.kr|co\.nz|co\.th|co\.uk|co\.za|com|com\.ar|com\.au|com\.br|com\.fn|com\.gr|com\.hk|com\.mx|com\.my|com\.ph|com\.pr|com\.ru|com\.sg|com\.tr|com\.tw|com\.ua|de|dk|fi|fr|gr|ie|it|lv|nl|pl|pt|ro|se|sk)" DumbSearchEngine=1

However, I did that not through my own very bad knowledge of regular expressions, but by emulating what I saw elsewhere. I just don't have the know-how or the adequate reference to stave off the other search engines, really.

I’m now hoping others have worked out similar ways of describing and/or blocking things like AltaVista Video, Yahoo Video Search, and so on, without blocking Google, AltaVista, and Yahoo themselves. I also do not want to go too wide by blocking anything with ‘images’ or ‘video’ in the name itself, for example.

I then can direct them to a Forbidden error, so that they never even hit my StatCounter, which is the ultimate goal. I'm not a heavy multimedia website -- for some reason, if I am linking to an MP3 or AVI on another website, Yahoo, AltaVista, Google are all deciding that I'M hosting the image and linking their image- or video-search to me. Bastards.

Thanks.

Perl regular expression question

pornucopia — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 14:04:51 -0800

Perl regular expression question inside. Trying to parse a list of items... Ok, I have a file listing things formatted like this:

Items foobar:
a1
a2
a3
a4
Items foobaz:
b1
b2
b3

I'm trying to use a regular expression to determine whether a given item comes after foobar or after foobaz. I'm doing something like this:
$variable = "b3";
$text_of_file =~ /Items (\S+?):.*?$variable/;
print "$1\n";

I figured that adding a ? after the * to make it non-greedy would mean that it would print "foobaz", but unfortunately it's printing "foobar".

Can someone suggest a better way to do this? It occured to me that I could split the list up into sections using something like:
@sections = split(/foob\S\S/, $text_of_file)
but that seemed like a lame hack, and it seems like you should be able to easily do this using a regex.

Regular expression question

xmutex — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:44:03 -0800

RegexFilter: I want to strip out all HTML from a string except for approved tags of B and I. I have this pattern : "< (p|img)*?>" Which strips out any instance of P or IMG tags, but I want to reverse it... I want to say only allow B or I. I tried this: "< ^(b|i)*?>" thinking that mean any character NOT in the group b or i, but no go. Any tips before I go insane?

Regular Expressions? PHP? Existing App?

TiggleTaggleTiger — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 13:58:42 -0800

I have a bunch of directories of static HTML files in which I need to: -> Find A -> Find B -> Replace A with B -> Save, close, repeat with every one of the 500 or so files. Anyone got an idea? I've written some PHP functions that will do the find and replace bit but I'm having a bitch of a time figuring out how to run the script across my whole file system.

(How|Where) does one find Google's (guide|help) on (searching|querying) using regular expressions?

Gyan — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 04:34:41 -0800

Well, what do you know, err.. what do I know, Google does support some sort of regular expressions. However, I can't find the usage guide. Anyone?

real estate hacks: scraping together a house

craniac — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 08:11:38 -0800

I'm looking for a home closer to my work, and I'm trying to be systematic about it. My plan is to scrape online real estate databases and put them into a spreadsheet, then start ranking and comparing. So, I guess I have two questions:

1. What would be the best tool (text wrangler?) to extract fields from an archived html page? (I am using OS X Tiger and am loosely familiar with regex)

2. Would I probably be better off just driving around key neighborhoods and jotting stuff down by hand?

(Sample database: Utah real estate)

Shell Scripting and Regex Voodoo.

Freen — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 09:22:00 -0800

I've got a problem. There is this ASP website that has gone down for repairs. I've got a wget of the whole site and i need to put the mirror back up on the internet. I've got Os X, and Developer tools installed, etc. I need a shell script to help me get this done. The files are saved in a directory format.

\site.com\page.asp
\site.com\page.asp?random_info
\site.com\foo\otherpage.asp?random_bar

Etc.

I need to recursivle go through the folder and all subfolders, finding any filename that contains *.asp* and append ".html" to the end of the file.

so \site.com\foo\otherpage.asp?bar
becomes
\site.com\foo\otherpage.asp?bar.html

Thats part one.

Part two involves searching through the files themselves, and looking for links that contain *.asp*

i.e. [a href="\otherpage.asp?foobar"]link to foobar[/a]

and change it to:
[a href="otherpage.asp?foobar.html"] link to foobar[/a]

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Question number 8542

mwhybark — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 18:49:34 -0800

Using wildcards in virtusertable for sendmail: resources, pointers, and simple examples, please. Google-fu fails to provide examples that answer my questions. [emm eye]