I am building a mail merge type function in google docs scripts. I have chosen to use square brackets to delimit the fields. I have noticed replaceText does strange things when matching for strings with square brackets, as demonstrated by the following test function.
function testReplace()
{
var outputDoc = DocumentApp.create("testReplace");
outputDoc.appendParagraph('Hello [World]');
var body = outputDoc.getActiveSection();
body.replaceText('[World]', 'There');
// Document content:
// HeThereThereThere [ThereThereThereThereThere]
// I would have expected:
// Hello There
}
Can anyone explain what is going on? Thanks in Advance.
You're replacing every occurrence of 'W','o','r','l', or 'd' with 'There'
[xyz] matches 'x', 'y', or 'z', not 'xyz'.
You need to escape the square brackets. Try "\[World\]"
Here's an answer with a basic primer on how to use regular expressions
I had the same issue, Use slash twise, this solved my issue.
Related
I'm trying to match the prefix of the string Something. For example, If input So,SOM,SomeTH,some,S, it is all accepted because they are all prefixes of Something.
My code
Ss[oO]|Ss[omOMOmoM] {
printf("Accept Something": %s\n", yytext);
}
Input
Som
Output
Accept Something: So
Invalid Character
It's suppose to read Som because it is a prefix of Something. I don't get why my code doesn't work. Can anyone correct me on what I am doing wrong?
I don't know what you think the meaning of
Ss[oO]|Ss[omOMOmoM]
is, but what it matches is either:
an S followed by an s followed by exactly one of the letters o or O, or
an S followed by an s followed by exactly one of the letters o, O, m or M. Putting a symbol more than once inside a bracket expression has no effect.
Also, I don't see how that could produce the output you report. Perhaps there was a copy-and-paste error, or perhsps you have other pattern rules.
If you want to match prefixes, use nested optional matches:
s(o(m(e(t(h(i(ng?)?)?)?)?)?)?)?
If you want case-insensitive matcges, you could write out all the character classes, but that gets tiriesome; simpler is to use a case-insensitve flag:
(?i:s(o(m(e(t(h(i(ng?)?)?)?)?)?)?)?)
(?i: turns on the insensitive flag, until the matching close parenthesis.
In practice, this is probably not what you want. Normally, you will want to recognise a complete word as a token. You could then check to see if the word is a prefix in the rule action:
[[:alpha:]]+ { if (yyleng <= strlen("something") && 0 == strncasemp(yytext, "something", yyleng) {
/* do something */
}
}
There is lots of information in the Flex manual.
Right now your code (as shown) should only match "Sso" or "SsO" or "Ssm" or "SsM".
You have two alternatives that each start with Ss (without square brackets) so those will be matched literally. That's followed by either [oO] or [omOMomoM], but the characters in square brackets represent alternatives, so that's equivalent to [oOmM] --i.e., any one character of of o, O, m or M.
I'd start with: %option caseless to make it a case-insensitive scanner, so you don't have to list the upper- and lower-case equivalents of every letter.
Then it's probably easiest to just list the alternatives literally:
s|so|som|some|somet|someth|somethi|somethin|something { printf("found prefix"); }
I guess you can make the pattern a bit shorter (at least in the source code) by doing something on this order:
s(o(m(e(t(h(i(n(n(g)?)?)?)?)?)?)?)?)? { printf("found prefix"); }
Doesn't seem like a huge improvement to me, but some might find it more attractive than I do.
If you don't want to use %option caseless the basic idea helps more:
[sS]([oO]([mM]([eE]([tT]([hH]([iI]([nN]([gG])?)?)?)?)?)?)?)? { printf("found prefix"); }
Listing every possible combination of upper and lower case would get tedious.
I need a regex that will only find matches where the entire string matches my query.
For instance if I do a search for movies with the name "Red October" I only want to match on that exact title (case insensitive) but not match titles like "The Hunt For Red October". Not quite sure I know how to do this. Anyone know?
Thanks!
Try the following regular expression:
^Red October$
By default, regular expressions are case sensitive. The ^ marks the start of the matching text and $ the end.
Generally, and with default settings, ^ and $ anchors are a good way of ensuring that a regex matches an entire string.
A few caveats, though:
If you have alternation in your regex, be sure to enclose your regex in a non-capturing group before surrounding it with ^ and $:
^foo|bar$
is of course different from
^(?:foo|bar)$
Also, ^ and $ can take on a different meaning (start/end of line instead of start/end of string) if certain options are set. In text editors that support regular expressions, this is usually the default behaviour. In some languages, especially Ruby, this behaviour cannot even be switched off.
Therefore there is another set of anchors that are guaranteed to only match at the start/end of the entire string:
\A matches at the start of the string.
\Z matches at the end of the string or before a final line break.
\z matches at the very end of the string.
But not all languages support these anchors, most notably JavaScript.
I know that this may be a little late to answer this, but maybe it will come handy for someone else.
Simplest way:
var someString = "...";
var someRegex = "...";
var match = Regex.Match(someString , someRegex );
if(match.Success && match.Value.Length == someString.Length){
//pass
} else {
//fail
}
Use the ^ and $ modifiers to denote where the regex pattern sits relative to the start and end of the string:
Regex.Match("Red October", "^Red October$"); // pass
Regex.Match("The Hunt for Red October", "^Red October$"); // fail
You need to enclose your regex in ^ (start of string) and $ (end of string):
^Red October$
If the string may contain regex metasymbols (. { } ( ) $ etc), I propose to use
^\QYourString\E$
\Q starts quoting all the characters until \E.
Otherwise the regex can be unappropriate or even invalid.
If the language uses regex as string parameter (as I see in the example), double slash should be used:
^\\QYourString\\E$
Hope this tip helps somebody.
Sorry, but that's a little unclear.
From what i read, you want to do simple string compare. You don't need regex for that.
string myTest = "Red October";
bool isMatch = (myTest.ToLower() == "Red October".ToLower());
Console.WriteLine(isMatch);
isMatch = (myTest.ToLower() == "The Hunt for Red October".ToLower());
You can do it like this Exemple if i only want to catch one time the letter minus a in a string and it can be check with myRegex.IsMatch()
^[^e][e]{1}[^e]$
I'm trying to create a regular expression string that will capture the data between the opening and closing [] brackets and include the brackets from the following data:
data: [{"LOTS OF DATA}],
datatype: "local",
So far I'm using a regEx string "data:(.*)" and this is returning:
[{"LOTS OF DATA}],
This is almost correct but includes the ',' and the reason this is working is because theres a newline or carriage return before 'datatype:' So I have two questions:
How do I capture all characters including the newline & carriage return?
How do I match the ', datatype:' string. The issue with this is that I cannot guarantee the character type and number of characters between the ',' and 'datatype:' string, I need a wild card? The regEx string would look something like "data:(.*),???datatype:" where ??? is the wildcard?
Thanks for your help, this will be used within an iOS application.
data:\s*\[([^\[\]]*)\]\s*,\s*datatype:
This implies that no square brackets may occur within LOTS OF DATA.
You could even spare the trailing 'datatype:' match.
Should LOTS OF DATA contains square brackets you would have to come up with a more precise specification of its content.
I need to remove all \text generated by TeXForm in Mathematica.
What I am doing now is this:
MyTeXForm[a_]:=StringReplace[ToString[TeXForm[a]], "\\text" -> ""]
But the result keeps the braces, for example:
for a=fx,
the result of TeXForm[a] is \text{fx}
the result of MyTeXForm[a] is {fx}
But what I would like is it to be just fx
You should be able to use string patterns. Based on http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/StringPatterns.html, something like the following should work:
MyTeXForm[a_]:=StringReplace[ToString[TeXForm[a]], "\\text{"~~s___~~"}"->s]
I don't have Mathematica handy right now, but this should say 'Match "\text{" followed by zero or more characters that are stored in the variable s, followed by "}", then replace all of that with whatever is stored in s.'
UPDATE:
The above works in the simplest case of there being a single "\text{...}" element, but the pattern s___ is greedy, so on input a+bb+xx+y, which Mathematica's TeXForm renders as "a+\text{bb}+\text{xx}+y", it matches everything between the first "\text{" and last "}" --- so, "bb}+\text{xx" --- leading to the output
In[1]:= MyTeXForm[a+bb+xx+y]
Out[1]= a+bb}+\text{xx+y
A fix for this is to wrap the pattern with Shortest[], leading to a second definition
In[2]:= MyTeXForm2[a_] := StringReplace[
ToString[TeXForm[a]],
Shortest["\\text{" ~~ s___ ~~ "}"] -> s
]
which yields the output
In[3]:= MyTeXForm2[a+bb+xx+y]
Out[3]= a+bb+xx+y
as desired.
Unfortunately this still won't work when the text itself contains a closing brace. For example, the input f["a}b","c}d"] (for some reason...) would give
In[4]:= MyTeXForm2[f["a}b","c}d"]]
Out[4]= f(a$\$b},c$\$d})
instead of "f(a$\}$b,c$\}$d)", which would be the proper processing of the TeXForm output "f(\text{a$\}$b},\text{c$\}$d})".
This is what I did (works fine for me):
MyTeXForm[a_] := ToString[ToExpression[StringReplace[ToString[TeXForm[a]], "\\text" -> ""]][[1]]]
This is a really late reply, but I just came up against the same issue and discovered a simple solution. Put a space between the variables in the Mathematica expression that you wish to convert using TexForm.
For the original poster's example, the following code works great:
a=f x
TeXForm[a]
The output is as desired: f x
Since LaTeX will ignore that space in math mode, things will format correctly.
(As an aside, I was having the same issue with subscripted expressions that have two side-by-side variables in the subscript. Inserting a space between them solved the issue.)
I seen this code on a website
function filterPath(string) {
return string
.replace(/^\//,'')
.replace(/(index|default).[a-zA-Z]{3,4}$/,'')
.replace(/\/$/,'');
}
The result of this gave some really long code in nos,digits, and slashes and couldn't figure it out. Is it like a security trick or something like that.
I just cant seem to understand what is this "replace" function trying to achieve ?? If anyone could explain what does it mean...
These are regular expressions (called regex for short).
The actual expression is inside /.../ with \ beeing an escape character.
So /^\// holds an ^/ regex.
As for your exact expressions:
1. ^/: the / character at the begging of line (^)
2. (index|default).[a-zA-Z]{3,4}$:
3. the /$: / character at the end of line ($)