Is it possible to have a RegEx fall back to the beginning of the string and begin matching again?
Here's why I ask. Given the below string, I'd like to capture the sub strings black, red, blue, and green in that order, regardless of the order of occurrence in the subject string and only if all substrings are present in the subject string.
$str ='blue-ka93-red-kdke3-green-weifk-black'
So, for all of the below strings, the RegEx should capture black, red, blue, and green (in that order)
'blue-ka93-red-kdke3-green-weifk-black'
'green-ka93-red-kdke3-blue-weifk-black'
'blue-ka93-black-kdke3-green-weifk-red'
'green-ka93-black-kdke3-blue-weifk-red'
I wonder if there isn't a way to match a capture group then fall back to the start of the string and find the next capture group. I was hoping that something like ^.*(?=(black))^.*(?=(red))^.*(?=(blue))^.*(?=(green)) would work but of course the ^ and lookaheads do not behave this way.
Is it possible to construct such a RegEx?
For context, I'll be using the RegEx in PHP.
You can use
^(?=.*(black))(?=.*(red))(?=.*(blue))(?=.*(green))
Note: This will require all these keywords to be in the string.
See demo
There is no way to reset RegEx index when matching, so, you can only use capturing mechanism inside a positive lookahead anchored at the start. The lookahead will match an empty location at the start of the string (due to ^) and each of tose lookaheads in the RegEx above will be executed one after another if the previous one returned true (found a string of text meeting its pattern).
Your RegEx did not work the same way because you matched, consumed the text with.* (this subpattern was outside the lookaheads) and repeated the start of string anchor that automatically fails a RegEx if you do not use a multiline modifier.
Why not just use capture groups for maintaining the order.
^(?:(black)|(red)|(blue)|(green)|.)+$
This will match any string, all colors are optional.
See demo at regex101 or php demo at eval.in
Related
I am trying to grab the text after the first hyphen in a pattern
<title>.*?-(.*?)(-|<\/title>)
which then grabs DesiredText from the pattern below:
<title>Stuff - DesiredText - Other Stuff</title>
However in this pattern:
<title>Stuff - Unwanted - DesiredText - Otherstuff</title>
I want it to skip the 'Unwanted' text and match the text after the next hyphen instead (DesiredText). I made a regex101 with both patterns and need to modify my basic regex so that if a word or words I don't want to match are present in that capture group it then matches the second hyphen text instead:
https://regex101.com/r/veSqH3/1
I believe this is what you are looking for. The key is in using the caret (^) character within the square-bracket character list ([]). Using the caret and brackets together indicate a blacklist. It will only match things that are NOT in the list.
https://regex101.com/r/alAZhj/3
Pattern: <title>.*?-\s*([^-\s]*)\s*- End<\/title>
This matches anything in between the middle hyphens that is not a hyphen or space. You can of course modify the pattern to include such characters by using the following pattern.
Pattern: <title>.*?-\s*([^-]*)\s*- End<\/title>
This will match anything in between the middle hyphens that is not a hyphen, so that you can have less restricted text in there.
This will use a negative lookahead to disqualify Note. There may be ways to optimize the pattern, but I cannot do so with confidence because I don't know how variable your inputs strings are.
Pattern: /<title>.*?- (?P<title>(?!Note).*?)(?= -|<])/
Demo
I am using a positive lookahead to ensure the captured match doesn't have any unwanted trailing characters.
If you just want the second last delimited value, you could do something like this to return the value as the fullstring match:
~- \K[^-]*(?= - [^-]*?</title>)~
Or faster with a capture group:
~- ([^-]*) - [^-]*?</title>~
This assumes there are no hyphens in the value.
I took a different approach and focused on returning the capture prior to the last word, rather than any sort of negation. In this way it's highly generic.
This pattern will match what you want in the capture group:
\s-\s([a-zA-Z]+)\s-\s[a-zA-Z]+<\/title>
If you are concerned that this only match between title tags, then you can add:
<title>.*?\s-\s([a-zA-Z]+)\s-\s[a-zA-Z]+<\/title>
Here's a link to the Test
The only limitation to this I see, is that it uses words and whitespace, so if your desired match is "- Some phrase -" then this won't work with it, but that was not indicated in your example. It's a bit unclear because you used "other stuff" and then "otherstuff".
I have a long string containing Copyright: 'any length of unknown string here',
what regex should I write to exactly match this as substring in a string?
I tried this preg_replace('/Copyright:(.*?)/', 'mytext', $str); but its not working, it only matches the Copyright:
A lazily quantified pattern at the end of the pattern will always match no text in case of *? and 1 char only in case of +?, i.e. will match as few chars as possible to return a valid match.
You need to make sure you get to the ', by putting them into the pattern:
'/Copyright:.*?\',/'
^^^
See the regex demo
The ? in your group 1 (.*?) makes this block lazy, i.e. matching as few characters as possible. Removing that would solve it.
Copyright:(.*)',
However, that would match everything in that same line. If you have text in that same line, make sure to limit it further. My screenshot below just just grouping () to make it easier for you to look, you can do without the parentheses.
I usually use Regxr.com to test my regular expression, there's also many other similar tools online, note that this one is great in UX, but does not support lookbehind.
It is necessary to check string. It should contain one substring AND dont contain other substring. This should works only with regexp.
Examples. We accept string with 'fruit' substring, but don't accept string contains substring 'love':
We all love green fruit. -> dont match
We all love to walk. -> dont match
We all green fruit. -> match
Write one regex if it possible.
/(?<!love).+fruit/ dont work
I think this will work
^(?!.*\blove\b)(?=.*\bfruit\b).*
<------------><------------->
Don't match Match this
this word word
Regex Demo
NOTE :- You can remove \b if you assume to match substring..
Surely, you can achieve what you want with strpos, but you specified you only need a regex solution. Note that this is not the best approach for this task unless you need to check for the substrings in a specific context (like within word boundaries, or after or before specific symbols, etc.)
The (?<!love).+fruit regex matches any 1+ characters that are not preceded with love substring up to the fruit substring. It will match I love fruit because the lookbehind asserts true at the beginning of the string, then .+ grabs the whole string, then backtracking does its job to get fruit.
In fact, you only need 1 lookahead to check if there is no love anchored at the start of the string:
^(?!.*love).*fruit
^^^^^^^^^^
See the regex demo
You only check for the substring love with (?!.*love) at the beginning of the string (due to ^), and then, if it is missing, the regex goes on matching any characters (other than a newline if /s modifier is not use) up to the last fruit.
Here is a PHP demo:
$re = "/^(?!.*love).*fruit/";
if (preg_match($re, "We all love green fruit."))
{
echo "Matched!"; // Won't be displayed since there is no match
}
How do you inverse a Regex expression in PHP?
This is my code:
preg_match("!<div class=\"foo\">.*?</div>!is", $source, $matches);
This is checking the $source String for everything within the Container and stores it in the $matches variable.
But what I want to do is reversing the expression i.e. I want to get everything that is NOT inside the container.
I know there is something called negative lookahead, but I am really bad with Regular expressions and didn't manage to come up with a working solution.
Simply using ?!
preg_match("?!<div class=\"foo\">.*?</div>!is", $source, $matches);
Does not seem to work.
Thanks!
New solution
Since your goal is to remove the matching divs, as mentioned in the comment, using the original regex with preg_split, plus implode would be the simpler solution:
implode('', preg_split('~<div class="foo">.*?</div>~is', $text))
Demo on ideone
Old solution
I'm not sure whether this is a good idea, but here is my solution:
~(.*?)(?:<div class="foo">.*?</div>|$)~is
Demo on regex101
The result can be picked out from capturing group 1 of each matches.
Note that the last match is always an empty string, and there can be empty string match between 2 matching divs or if the string starts with matching div. However, you need to concatenate them anyway, so it seems to be a non-issue.
The idea is to rely on the fact that lazy quantifier .*? will always try the sequel (whatever comes after it) first before advancing itself, resulting in something similar to look-ahead assertion that makes sure that whatever matched by .*? will not be inside <div class="foo">.*?</div>.
The div tag is matched along in each match in order to advance the cursor past the closing tag. $ is used to match the text after the last matching div.
The s flag makes . matches any character, including line separators.
Revision: I had to change .+? to .*?, since .+? handle strings with 2 matching div next to each other and strings start with matching div.
Anyway, it's not a good idea to modify HTML with regular expression. Use a parser instead.
<div class=\"foo\">.*?</div>\K|.
You can simply do this by using \K.
\K resets the starting point of the reported match. Any previously consumed characters are no longer included in the final match
I have a string. An example might be "Contact /u/someone on reddit, or visit /r/subreddit or /r/subreddit2"
I want to replace any instance of "/r/x" and "/u/x" with "[/r/x](http://reddit.com/r/x)" and "[/u/x](http://reddit.com/u/x)" basically.
So I'm not sure how to 1) find "/r/" and then expand that to the rest of the word (until there's a space), then 2) take that full "/r/x" and replace with my pattern, and most importantly 3) do this for all "/r/" and "/u/" matches in a single go...
The only way I know to do this would be to write a function to walk the string, character by character, until I found "/", then look for "r" and "/" to follow; then keep going until I found a space. That would give me the beginning and ending characters, so I could do a string replacement; then calculate the new end point, and continue walking the string.
This feels... dumb. I have a feeling there's a relatively simple way to do this, and I just don't know how to google to get all the relevant parts.
A simple preg_replace will do what you want.
Try:
$string = preg_replace('#(/(?:u|r)/[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)#', '[\1](http://reddit.com\1)', $string);
Here is an example: http://ideone.com/dvz2zB
You should see if you can discover what characters are valid in a Reddit name or in a Reddit username and modify the [a-zA-Z0-9_-] charset accordingly.
You are looking for a regular expression.
A basic pattern starts out as a fixed string. /u/ or /r/ which would match those exactly. This can be simplified to match one or another with /(?:u|r)/ which would match the same as those two patterns. Next you would want to match everything from that point up to a space. You would use a negative character group [^ ] which will match any character that is not a space, and apply a modifier, *, to match as many characters as possible that match that group. /(?:u|r)/[^ ]*
You can take that pattern further and add a lookbehind, (?<= ) to ensure your match is preceded by a space so you're not matching a partial which results in (?<= )/(?:u|r)/[^ ]*. You wrap all of that to make a capturing group ((?<= )/(?:u|r)/[^ ]*). This will capture the contents within the parenthesis to allow for a replacement pattern. You can express your chosen replacement using the \1 reference to the first captured group as [\1](http://reddit.com\1).
In php you would pass the matching pattern, replacement pattern, and subject string to the preg_replace function.
In my opinion regex would be an overkill for such a simple operation. If you just want to replace instance of "/r/x" with "[r/x](http://reddit.com/r/x)" and "/u/x" with "[/u/x](http://reddit.com/u/x)" you should use str_replace although with preg_replace it'll lessen the code.
str_replace("/r/x","[/r/x](http://reddit.com/r/x)","whatever_string");
use regex for intricate search string and replace. you can also use http://www.jslab.dk/tools.regex.php regular expression generator if you have something complex to capture in the string.