What's wrong with this regular expression containing math symbols? (Ruby/Rails) - ruby-on-rails

text.scan(/\"[\d\w\s\+\-\*\/]*\"/)
I'm simply looking to find any thing within quotations that can contain letters, numbers, spaces, plus, minus, star, or forward slash. Everything works great in console. Each of the following works in a browser:
"abc"
"123"
"x-1" or "x - 1"
"x/1" or "x / 1"
But the plus sign and star fail in a browser (despite working fine in console with the same regex). Does anyone have any ideas?
Edit #1: I'm performing a quick gsub to add some formatting to the results of the scan. If the quotations have a plus or star in them, they don't even get picked up by the scan. The same code and text pasted in console works just fine.
Edit #2: I figured out a better way to frame this question without extraneous details and got the answer. "Why can't I perform a gsub on each of the results from a scan if the result contains regex special characters?"

Turned out that this problem was related to regexp string insertion (/#{whatever}/) not escaping special characters - manually escaping clears it up (/#{Regexp.escape(whatever)}/). See this question for a full example/explanation.

I don't know what do you mean "work in browser" but I'm making an assumption that you're trying to parse an URL. In URL the + & * signs can be converted to %2B & %2A respectively.
Try this regexp:
/"[(\d\w\s\+\-\*\/|%2B|%2A)]+"/
...or decode URL before parsing.

Related

ODATA: Special Character in URL

I am facing an issue in creating a ODATA URL.
For the Following URL,
https://xxxxxxx.xxx.xxxxxxxx.com/sap/c4c/odata/v1/c4codataapi/CorporateAccountHasContactPersonCollection?$filter=AccountID eq '1000024'
Result :
- <m:properties>
<d:ObjectID>00163E10AD0B1ED686EF458B4E8C51D5</d:ObjectID>
<d:ParentObjectID>00163E10AD201EE5A4F0B592DE751AE8</d:ParentObjectID
<d:AccountID>1000024</d:AccountID>
<d:ContactID>1002636</d:ContactID>
<d:FunctionCode>Z021</d:FunctionCode>
<d:Mobile>+33 123456789</d:Mobile>
<d:Phone>+33 987654321</d:Phone>
</m:properties>
Same for result when i change filter to FunctionCode
https://xxxxxxx.xxx.xxxxxxxx.com/sap/c4c/odata/v1/c4codataapi/CorporateAccountHasContactPersonCollection?$filter=FunctionCode eq 'Z021'
But When I search with filter Phone
https://xxxxxxx.xxx.xxxxxxxx.com/sap/c4c/odata/v1/c4codataapi/CorporateAccountHasContactPersonCollection?$filter=Phone eq '+33 123456789'
URL doesnt work at all. Is it becuase of special character "+" in Phone Number
I tried with $filter=endswith(Phone, '123456789'), It worked fine. But this is not solution i am looking for.
Can any one suggest another ways?
Thank you
Regards
Prat
The reason is that these special characters has different meaning when used in URLs. The JavaScript “encodeUri” or “encodeUriComponent” does not solve this problem.
Here is the list of the special characters that needs to be replaced when used in the OData queries:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa226544(SQL.80).aspx
The special character + Indicates a space (and spaces cannot be used in a URL) so you need to replace the character's with its hexadecimal value, in this case %2B.
Your corrected filter should then be $filter=Phone eq '%2B33 123456789'.
Find a good article here.

Don't match dot in beginning of string

I have one path in form of string like this Folder1/File.png
But in this string sometimes if file is hidden or folder is hidden I don't want it to be matched by my regex.
regex = %r{([a-zA-Z0-9_ -]*)\/[^.]+$}
input_path = "Folder_1/.file" # This shouldn't be matched.
input_path = "Folder/file.png" # This should be matched.
But my regex works for first input but its not even matching second one.
You are currently looking for \/[^.]+$, that is a / followed by any character except . until the end. Since the filename+extension format has a . character, it fails to match the second case.
Instead of using [^.]+$, check only that the character following / is not ., and match everything after that:
([a-zA-Z0-9_ -]*)\/[^.].*$
While there are some suggestions here that work, my suggestion would be
\/[^.][^\/\n]+$
It finds a slash, followed by anything but a dot, which in turn is followed by one, or more, of anything but a slash or a newline.
To handle the two lines given as an example,
Folder_1/.file
Folder/file.png
it takes 8 steps.
The suggested ones all work, but ([a-zA-Z0-9_ -]*)\/[^.] takes 75 steps, ([a-zA-Z0-9_ -]*)\/[^.]+\.[^.]+\z 78 steps and ([a-zA-Z0-9_ -]*)\/[^.].*$ takes 77 steps.
This may be totally irrelevant and I may have missed some angle, but I wanted to mention it ;)
Se it here at regex101.
regex = %r{([a-zA-Z0-9_ -]*)\/[^.]}

Rails strip all except numbers commas and decimal points

Hi I've been struggling with this for the last hour and am no closer. How exactly do I strip everything except numbers, commas and decimal points from a rails string? The closest I have so far is:-
rate = rate.gsub!(/[^0-9]/i, '')
This strips everything but the numbers. When I try add commas to the expression, everything is getting stripped. I got the aboves from somewhere else and as far as I can gather:
^ = not
Everything to the left of the comma gets replaced by what's in the '' on the right
No idea what the /i does
I'm very new to gsub. Does anyone know of a good tutorial on building expressions?
Thanks
Try:
rate = rate.gsub(/[^0-9,\.]/, '')
Basically, you know the ^ means not when inside the character class brackets [] which you are using, and then you can just add the comma to the list. The decimal needs to be escaped with a backslash because in regular expressions they are a special character that means "match anything".
Also, be aware of whether you are using gsub or gsub!
gsub! has the bang, so it edits the instance of the string you're passing in, rather than returning another one.
So if using gsub! it would be:
rate.gsub!(/[^0-9,\.]/, '')
And rate would be altered.
If you do not want to alter the original variable, then you can use the version without the bang (and assign it to a different var):
cleaned_rate = rate.gsub!(/[^0-9,\.]/, '')
I'd just google for tutorials. I haven't used one. Regexes are a LOT of time and trial and error (and table-flipping).
This is a cool tool to use with a mini cheat-sheet on it for ruby that allows you to quickly edit and test your expression:
http://rubular.com/
You can just add the comma and period in the square-bracketed expression:
rate.gsub(/[^0-9,.]/, '')
You don't need the i for case-insensitivity for numbers and symbols.
There's lots of info on regular expressions, regex, etc. Maybe search for those instead of gsub.
You can use this:
rate = rate.gsub!(/[^0-9\.\,]/g,'')
Also check this out to learn more about regular expressions:
http://www.regexr.com/

Regular expression in Ruby

Could anybody help me make a proper regular expression from a bunch of text in Ruby. I tried a lot but I don't know how to handle variable length titles.
The string will be of format <sometext>title:"<actual_title>"<sometext>. I want to extract actual_title from this string.
I tried /title:"."/ but it doesnt find any matches as it expects a closing quotation after one variable from opening quotation. I couldn't figure how to make it check for variable length of string. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
. matches any single character. Putting + after a character will match one or more of those characters. So .+ will match one or more characters of any sort. Also, you should put a question mark after it so that it matches the first closing-quotation mark it comes across. So:
/title:"(.+?)"/
The parentheses are necessary if you want to extract the title text that it matched out of there.
/title:"([^"]*)"/
The parentheses create a capturing group. Inside is first a character class. The ^ means it's negated, so it matches any character that's not a ". The * means 0 or more. You can change it to one or more by using + instead of *.
I like /title:"(.+?)"/ because of it's use of lazy matching to stop the .+ consuming all text until the last " on the line is found.
It won't work if the string wraps lines or includes escaped quotes.
In programming languages where you want to be able to include the string deliminator inside a string you usually provide an 'escape' character or sequence.
If your escape character was \ then you could write something like this...
/title:"((?:\\"|[^"])+)"/
This is a railroad diagram. Railroad diagrams show you what order things are parsed... imagine you are a train starting at the left. You consume title:" then \" if you can.. if you can't then you consume not a ". The > means this path is preferred... so you try to loop... if you can't you have to consume a '"' to finish.
I made this with https://regexper.com/#%2Ftitle%3A%22((%3F%3A%5C%5C%22%7C%5B%5E%22%5D)%2B)%22%2F
but there is now a plugin for Atom text editor too that does this.

removing whitespaces in ActionScript 2 variables

let's say that I have an XML file containing this :
<description><![CDATA[
<h2>lorem ipsum</h2>
<p>some text</p>
]]></description>
that I want to get and parse in ActionScript 2 as HTML text, and setting some CSS before displaying it. Problem is, Flash takes those whitespaces (line feed and tab) and display it as it is.
<some whitespace here>
lorem ipsum
some text
where the output I want is
lorem ipsum
some text
I know that I could remove the whitespaces directly from the XML file (the Flash developer at my workplace also suggests this. I guess that he doesn't have any idea on how to do this [sigh]). But by doing this, it would be difficult to read the section in the XML file, especially when lots of tags are involved and that makes editing more difficult.
So now, I'm looking for a way to strip those whitespaces in ActionScript. I've tried to use PHP's str_replace equivalent (got it from here). But what should I use as a needle (string to search) ? (I've tried to put in "\t" and "\r", don't seem to be able to detect those whitespaces).
edit :
now that I've tried to throw in newline as a needle, it works (meaning that newline successfully got stripped).
mystring = str_replace(newline, '', mystring);
But, newlines only got stripped once, meaning that in every consecutive newlines, (eg. a newline followed by another newline) only one newline can be stripped away.
Now, I don't see that this as a problem in the str_replace function, since every consecutive character other than newline get stripped away just fine.
Pretty much confused about how stuff like this is handled in ActionScript. :-s
edit 2:
I've tried str_replace -ing everything I know of, \n, \r, \t, newline, and tab (by pressing tab key). Replacing \n, \r, and \t seem to have no effect whatsoever.
I know that by successfully doing this, my content can never have real line breaks. That's exactly my intention. I could format the XML the way I want without Flash displaying any of the formatting stuff. :)
Several ways to approach this. Perhaps the simplest answer is, in one sense your Flash developer is probably right, and you should move your whitespace outside of the CDATA container. The reason being, many people (me at least) tend to assume that everything inside a CDATA is "real data", as opposed to markup. On the other hand, whitespace outside a CDATA is normally assumed to be irrelevant, so data like this:
<description>
<![CDATA[<h2>lorem ipsum</h2>
<p>some text</p>]]>
</description>
would be easier to understand and to work with. (The flash developer can use the XML.ignoreWhite property to ignore the whitespace outside the CDATA.)
With that said, if you're editing the XML by hand, then I can see why it would be easier to use the formatting you describe. However, if the extra whitespace is inside the CDATA, then it will inevitable be included in the String data you extract, so your only option is to grab the content of the CDATA and remove the whitespace afterwards.
Then your question reduces to "how do I strip leading/trailing whitespace from a String in AS2?". And unfortunately, since AS2 doesn't support RegEx there's no simple way to do this. I think your best option would be to parse through from the beginning and end to find the first/last non-white character. Something along these lines (untested pseudocode):
myString = stuffFromXML;
whitespace = " " + "\t" + "\n" + "\r" + newline;
start = 0;
end = myString.length;
while ( testString( myString.substr(start,1), whitespace ) ) { start++; }
while ( testString( myString.substr(end-1,1), whitespace ) ) { end--; }
trimmedString = myString.substring( start, end );
function testString( needle, haystack ) {
return ( haystack.indexOf( needle ) > -1 );
}
Hope that helps!
Edit: I notice that in your example you'd also need to remove tabs and whitespace within your text data. This would be tricky, unless you can guarantee that your data will never include "real" tabs in addition to the ones for formatting. No matter what you do with the CDATA tags, it would probably be wiser not to insert extraneous formatting inside your real content and then remove it programmatically afterward. That's just making your own life difficult.
Second edit: As for what character to remove to get rid of newlines, it depends partially on what characters are actually in the XML to begin with (which probably depends on what OS is running where the file is generated), and partially on what character the client machine (that's showing the flash) considers a newline. Lots of gory details here. In practice though, if you remove \r, \n, and \r\n, that usually does the trick. That's why I added both \r and \n to the "whitespace" string in my example code.
its been a while since I've tinkered with AS2.
someXML = new XML();
someXML.ignoreWhite = true;
if you wanted to str_replace try '\n'
Is there a reason that you are using cdata? Admittedly I have no idea what the best practice for this sort of this is, but I tend to leave them out and just have the HTML sit there inside the node.
var foo = node.childnodes.join("") parses it out just fine and I never seem to come across these whitespace problems.
I'm reading this over and over again, and if I'm interpreting you right, all you want to know how to do is strip certain characters (tabs and newlines) from a string in AS2, right? I cannot believe no one has given you the simple one line answer yet:
myString = myString.split("\n").join("");
That's it. Repeat that for \r, \n, and \t and all newlines and tabs will be gone. If you want it as an easy function, then do this:
function stripWhiteSpace(str: String) : String
{
return str.split("\r").join("").split("\n").join("").split("\t").join("");
}
That function won't modify your old string, it will return a new one without \r, \n, or \t. To actually modify the old string use that function like this:
myString = stripWhiteSpace(myString);

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