I'm trying to write a simple regular expression that recognizes a sequence of characters that are not columns or are escaped columns.
I.e:
foo:bar //Does not match
but
foo\:bar //Does match
By my knowledge of Regular Languages, such language can be described by the regular expression
/([^:]|\\[:])*/
You can see a graphical representation of this expression in the wonderful tool Regexper
Using php's preg_match (that is based on the PCRE engine), such expression does not match "foo\:bar".
However, if substitute the class with the single char:
/([^:]|\\:)*/
the expression matches.
Do you have an explanation for this? Is this a sort of limitation of the PCRE engine on character classes?
PS: Testing the first expression on RegExr, that is based on AS3 Regexp engine, does not offer a match, while changing the alternation order:
/(\\[:]|[^:])*/
it does match, while the same expression does not match in PCRE.
preg_match() accepts a regular expression pattern as a string, so you need to double escape everything.
^(?:[^:\\\\]|\\\\:)+$
This matches one or more characters that are not colons or escape characters [^:\\\\], or an escaped colon \\\\:.
Why your first regular expression didn't work: /([^:]|\\[:])*/.
This matches a non-colon [^:], or it matches \\[:] which matches a literal [ followed by a literal : and then a literal ].
Why this works : /([^:]|\\:)*/ ?
This matches a non-colon [^:], or it matches a literal \\: so it effectively matches everything.
Edit: Why /([^:]|E[:])*/ won't match fooE:bar ?
This is what happens: [^:] matches the f then it matches o then the other o then it matches the E, now it finds a colon : and it can't match it, but since by default the PCRE engine doesn't look for the longest possible match it is satisfied with what is has matched so far and stops right there and returns fooE as a match without trying the other alternative E[:] (which is equal by the way to E:) at all.
If you want to match the entire sequence then you will to use an expression like this one:
/([^:E]|E[:])*/
This prevents [^:] from consuming that E.
You can try this. This allow the secuence \\: to have a chance before the negated character class [^:].
^(?:\\:|[^:])+$
If you use the values in the alternation bar inverted as in ^((?:[^:]|\\:)+$ it will not match escaped colon \: because the first alternative will consume the slash (\) before the second expression have a chance to try.
Related
Simple regex question. I have a string on the following format:
this is a [sample] string with [some] special words. [another one]
What is the regular expression to extract the words within the square brackets, ie.
sample
some
another one
Note: In my use case, brackets cannot be nested.
You can use the following regex globally:
\[(.*?)\]
Explanation:
\[ : [ is a meta char and needs to be escaped if you want to match it literally.
(.*?) : match everything in a non-greedy way and capture it.
\] : ] is a meta char and needs to be escaped if you want to match it literally.
(?<=\[).+?(?=\])
Will capture content without brackets
(?<=\[) - positive lookbehind for [
.*? - non greedy match for the content
(?=\]) - positive lookahead for ]
EDIT: for nested brackets the below regex should work:
(\[(?:\[??[^\[]*?\]))
This should work out ok:
\[([^]]+)\]
Can brackets be nested?
If not: \[([^]]+)\] matches one item, including square brackets. Backreference \1 will contain the item to be match. If your regex flavor supports lookaround, use
(?<=\[)[^]]+(?=\])
This will only match the item inside brackets.
To match a substring between the first [ and last ], you may use
\[.*\] # Including open/close brackets
\[(.*)\] # Excluding open/close brackets (using a capturing group)
(?<=\[).*(?=\]) # Excluding open/close brackets (using lookarounds)
See a regex demo and a regex demo #2.
Use the following expressions to match strings between the closest square brackets:
Including the brackets:
\[[^][]*] - PCRE, Python re/regex, .NET, Golang, POSIX (grep, sed, bash)
\[[^\][]*] - ECMAScript (JavaScript, C++ std::regex, VBA RegExp)
\[[^\]\[]*] - Java, ICU regex
\[[^\]\[]*\] - Onigmo (Ruby, requires escaping of brackets everywhere)
Excluding the brackets:
(?<=\[)[^][]*(?=]) - PCRE, Python re/regex, .NET (C#, etc.), JGSoft Software
\[([^][]*)] - Bash, Golang - capture the contents between the square brackets with a pair of unescaped parentheses, also see below
\[([^\][]*)] - JavaScript, C++ std::regex, VBA RegExp
(?<=\[)[^\]\[]*(?=]) - Java regex, ICU (R stringr)
(?<=\[)[^\]\[]*(?=\]) - Onigmo (Ruby, requires escaping of brackets everywhere)
NOTE: * matches 0 or more characters, use + to match 1 or more to avoid empty string matches in the resulting list/array.
Whenever both lookaround support is available, the above solutions rely on them to exclude the leading/trailing open/close bracket. Otherwise, rely on capturing groups (links to most common solutions in some languages have been provided).
If you need to match nested parentheses, you may see the solutions in the Regular expression to match balanced parentheses thread and replace the round brackets with the square ones to get the necessary functionality. You should use capturing groups to access the contents with open/close bracket excluded:
\[((?:[^][]++|(?R))*)] - PHP PCRE
\[((?>[^][]+|(?<o>)\[|(?<-o>]))*)] - .NET demo
\[(?:[^\]\[]++|(\g<0>))*\] - Onigmo (Ruby) demo
If you do not want to include the brackets in the match, here's the regex: (?<=\[).*?(?=\])
Let's break it down
The . matches any character except for line terminators. The ?= is a positive lookahead. A positive lookahead finds a string when a certain string comes after it. The ?<= is a positive lookbehind. A positive lookbehind finds a string when a certain string precedes it. To quote this,
Look ahead positive (?=)
Find expression A where expression B follows:
A(?=B)
Look behind positive (?<=)
Find expression A where expression B
precedes:
(?<=B)A
The Alternative
If your regex engine does not support lookaheads and lookbehinds, then you can use the regex \[(.*?)\] to capture the innards of the brackets in a group and then you can manipulate the group as necessary.
How does this regex work?
The parentheses capture the characters in a group. The .*? gets all of the characters between the brackets (except for line terminators, unless you have the s flag enabled) in a way that is not greedy.
Just in case, you might have had unbalanced brackets, you can likely design some expression with recursion similar to,
\[(([^\]\[]+)|(?R))*+\]
which of course, it would relate to the language or RegEx engine that you might be using.
RegEx Demo 1
Other than that,
\[([^\]\[\r\n]*)\]
RegEx Demo 2
or,
(?<=\[)[^\]\[\r\n]*(?=\])
RegEx Demo 3
are good options to explore.
If you wish to simplify/modify/explore the expression, it's been explained on the top right panel of regex101.com. If you'd like, you can also watch in this link, how it would match against some sample inputs.
RegEx Circuit
jex.im visualizes regular expressions:
Test
const regex = /\[([^\]\[\r\n]*)\]/gm;
const str = `This is a [sample] string with [some] special words. [another one]
This is a [sample string with [some special words. [another one
This is a [sample[sample]] string with [[some][some]] special words. [[another one]]`;
let m;
while ((m = regex.exec(str)) !== null) {
// This is necessary to avoid infinite loops with zero-width matches
if (m.index === regex.lastIndex) {
regex.lastIndex++;
}
// The result can be accessed through the `m`-variable.
m.forEach((match, groupIndex) => {
console.log(`Found match, group ${groupIndex}: ${match}`);
});
}
Source
Regular expression to match balanced parentheses
(?<=\[).*?(?=\]) works good as per explanation given above. Here's a Python example:
import re
str = "Pagination.go('formPagination_bottom',2,'Page',true,'1',null,'2013')"
re.search('(?<=\[).*?(?=\])', str).group()
"'formPagination_bottom',2,'Page',true,'1',null,'2013'"
The #Tim Pietzcker's answer here
(?<=\[)[^]]+(?=\])
is almost the one I've been looking for. But there is one issue that some legacy browsers can fail on positive lookbehind.
So I had to made my day by myself :). I manged to write this:
/([^[]+(?=]))/g
Maybe it will help someone.
console.log("this is a [sample] string with [some] special words. [another one]".match(/([^[]+(?=]))/g));
if you want fillter only small alphabet letter between square bracket a-z
(\[[a-z]*\])
if you want small and caps letter a-zA-Z
(\[[a-zA-Z]*\])
if you want small caps and number letter a-zA-Z0-9
(\[[a-zA-Z0-9]*\])
if you want everything between square bracket
if you want text , number and symbols
(\[.*\])
This code will extract the content between square brackets and parentheses
(?:(?<=\().+?(?=\))|(?<=\[).+?(?=\]))
(?: non capturing group
(?<=\().+?(?=\)) positive lookbehind and lookahead to extract the text between parentheses
| or
(?<=\[).+?(?=\]) positive lookbehind and lookahead to extract the text between square brackets
In R, try:
x <- 'foo[bar]baz'
str_replace(x, ".*?\\[(.*?)\\].*", "\\1")
[1] "bar"
([[][a-z \s]+[]])
Above should work given the following explaination
characters within square brackets[] defines characte class which means pattern should match atleast one charcater mentioned within square brackets
\s specifies a space
+ means atleast one of the character mentioned previously to +.
I needed including newlines and including the brackets
\[[\s\S]+\]
If someone wants to match and select a string containing one or more dots inside square brackets like "[fu.bar]" use the following:
(?<=\[)(\w+\.\w+.*?)(?=\])
Regex Tester
First see my string please:
$a = "[ child : parent ]";
How can I detect that the pattern is:
[(optional space)word or character(optional space) : (optional space)word or character(optional space)]
You can catch this as follows in PHP:
Your regular expression is /\[ *\w+ *: *\w+ *]/
You would write code that would look like this to see if it matched.
if (preg_match('/regex/', $string)) {
// do things
}
Explanation of the Regular Expression
There is a backslash (\) before the open bracket because
[ has special meaning in regular expressions. The backslash
prevents its special meaning from being used.
The asterisk (*) matches 0 or more of the previous character expression. In this
case, it matches 0 or more spaces. If you instead used the
expression \s*, it would match 0 or more white-space characters
(space, tab, line break). Finally, if you wanted it to match 0 or 1
of the previous character, you would use ? instead of *.
The plus (+) matches 1 or more of the previous character expression. The \w character expression matches a letter, digit, or underscore. If you don't want underscores to match, you should instead use a character class. For example, you could use [A-Za-z0-9].
You can find more information on regular expressions at http://www.regular-expressions.info and http://www.regular-expressions.info/php.html
From your sample text I'd say you mean a human word and not \w regex word
preg_match('/\[ ?([a-z]+) ?: ?([a-z]+) ?\]/i', $a, $matches);
Explained demo: http://regex101.com/r/hB2oV9
$matches will save both values, test with var_dump($matches);
I'm not sure on the php-specific version of regex, but this should work:
\[ ?\w+ ? : ?\w+ ?\]
Here is a site that I've used in the past to find regular expressions for my needed patterns.
use this regex \[\s*\w+\s*:\s*\w+\s*\]
I would probably do it like this
preg_match('/^\[\s?\w+\s+:\s+\w+\s?\]$/', $string)
I'm trying to understand a piece of code and came across this regular expression used in PHP's preg_replace function.
'/(?<!-)color[^{:]*:[^{#]*$/i'
This bit... (?<!-)
doesnt appear in any of my reg-exp manuals. Anyone know what this means please? (Google doesnt return anything - I dont think symbols work in google.)
The ?<! at the start of a parenthetical group is a negative lookbehind. It asserts that the word color (strictly, the c in the engine) was not preceded by a - character.
So, for a more concrete example, it would match color in the strings:
color
+color
someTextColor
But it will fail on something like -color or background-color. Also note that the engine will not technically "match" whatever precedes the c, it simply asserts that it is not a hyphen. This can be an important distinction depending on the context (illustrated on Rubular with a trivial example; note that only the b in the last string is matched, not the preceding letter).
PHP uses perl compatible regular expressions (PCRE) for the preg_* functions. From perldoc perlre:
"(?<!pattern)"
A zero-width negative look-behind assertion. For example
"/(?<!bar)foo/" matches any occurrence of "foo" that does
not follow "bar". Works only for fixed-width look-
behind.
I'm learning regular expressions using Python's re module!
http://docs.python.org/library/re.html
Matches if the current position in the string is not preceded by a match for .... This is called a negative lookbehind assertion. Similar to positive lookbehind assertions, the contained pattern must only match strings of some fixed length. Patterns which start with negative lookbehind assertions may match at the beginning of the string being searched.
I found this regex that works correctly but I didn't understand what is # (at the start) and at the end of the expression. Are not ^ and $ the start/end characters?
preg_match_all('#^/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$#', $s, $matches);
Thanks
The matched pattern contains many /, thus the # is used as regex delimeter. These are identical
/^something$/
and
#^something$#
If you have multiple / in your pattern the 2nd example is better suited to avoid ugly masking with \/. This is how the RE would like like with using the standard // syntax:
/^\/([^\/]+)\/([^\/]+)\/$/
About #:
That's a delimiter of the regular expression itself. It's only meaning is to tell which delimiter is used for the expression. Commonly / is used, but others are possible. PCRE expressions need a delimiter with preg_match or preg_match_all.
About ^:
Inside character classes ([...]), the ^ has the meaning of not if it's the first character.
[abc] : matching a, b or c
[^abc] : NOT matching a, b or c, match every other character instead
Also # at the start and the end here are custom regex delimiters. Instead of the usual /.../ you have #...#. Just like perl.
These are delimiters. You can use any delimiter you want, but they must appear at the start and end of the regular expression.
Please see this documentation for a detail insight in to regular expressions:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/pcre.pattern.php
You can use pretty much anything as delimiters. The most common one is /.../, but if the pattern itself contains / and you don't want to escape any and all occurrences, you can use a different delimiter. My personal preference is (...) because it reminds me that $0 of the result is the entire pattern. But you can do anything, <...>, #...#, %...%, {...}... well, almost anything. I don't know exactly what the requirements are, but I think it's "any non-alphanumeric character".
Let me break it down:
# is the first character, so this is the character used as the delimiter of the regular expression - we know we've got to the end when we reach the next (unescaped) one of these
^ outside of a character class, this means the beginning of the string
/ is just a normal 'slash' character
([^/]+) This is a bracketed expression containing at least one (+) instance of any character that isn't a / (^ at the beginning of a character class inverts the character class - meaning it will only match characters that are not in this list)
/ again
([^/]+) again
/ again
$ this matches the end of the string
# this is the final delimeter, so we know that the regex is now finished.
when I try preg_match with the following expression: /.{0,5}/, it still matches string longer than 5 characters.
It does, however, work properly when trying in online regexp matcher
The site you reference, myregexp.com, is focussed on Java.
Java has a specific function for matching an exact pattern, without needing to use anchor characters. This is the function which myregexp.com uses.
In most other languages, in order to match an exact pattern, you would need to add the anchoring characters ^ and $ at the start and end of the pattern respectively, otherwise the regex assumes it only needs to find the matched pattern somewhere within the string, rather than the whole string being the match.
This means that without the anchors, your pattern will match any string, of any length, because whatever the string, it will contain within it somewhere a match for "zero to five of any character".
So in PHP, and Perl, and virtually any other language, you need your pattern to look like this:
/^.{0,5}$/
Having explained all that, I would make one final observation though: this specific pattern really doesn't need to be a regular expression -- you could achieve the same thing with strlen(). In addition, the dot character in regex may not work exactly as you expect: it typically matches almost any character; some characters, including new line characters, are excluded by default, so if your string contains five characters, but one of them is a new line, it will fail your regex when you might have expected it to pass. With this in mind, strlen() would be a safer option (or mb_strlen() if you expect to have unicode characters).
If you need to match any character in regex, and the default behaviour of the dot isn't good enough, there are two options: One is to add the s modifier at the end of the expression (ie it becomes /^.{0,5}$/s). The s modifier tells regex to include new line characters in the dot "any character" match.
The other option (which is useful for languages that don't support the s modifier) is to use an expression and its negative together in a character class - eg [\s\S] - instead of the dot. \s matches any white space character, and \S is a negative of \s, so any character not matched by \s. So together in a character class they match any character. It's more long winded and less readable than a dot, but in some languages it's the only way to be sure.
You can find out more about this here: http://www.regular-expressions.info/dot.html
Hope that helps.
You need to anchor it with ^$. These symbols match the beginning and end of the string respectively, so it must be 0-5 characters between the beginning and end. Leaving out the anchors will match anywhere in the string so it could be longer.
/^.{0,5}$/
For better readability, I would probably also enclose the . in (), but that's kind of subjective.
/^(.){0,5}$/