Is it possible to set the grammar to match case insensitively.
so for example a rule:
checkName = 'CHECK' Word;
would match check name as well as CHECK name
Creator of PEGKit here.
The only way to do this currently is to use a Semantic Predicate in a round-about sort of way:
checkName = { MATCHES_IGNORE_CASE(LS(1), #"check") }? Word Word;
Some explanations:
Semantic Predicates are a feature lifted directly from ANTLR. The Semantic Predicate part is the { ... }?. These can be placed anywhere in your grammar rules. They should contain either a single expression or a series of statements ending in a return statement which evaluates to a boolean value. This one contains a single expression. If the expression evaluates to false, matching of the current rule (checkName in this case) will fail. A true value will allow matching to proceed.
MATCHES_IGNORE_CASE(str, regexPattern) is a convenience macro I've defined for your use in Predicates and Actions to do regex matches. It has a case-sensitive friend: MATCHES(str, regexPattern). The second argument is an NSString* regex pattern. Meaning should be obvious.
LS(num) is another convenience macro for your use in Predicates/Actions. It means fetch a Lookahead String and the argument specifies how far to lookahead. So LS(1) means lookahead by 1. In other words, "fetch the string value of the first upcoming token the parser is about to try to match".
Notice that I'm still matching Word twice at the end there. The first Word is necessary for matching 'check' (even though it was already tested in the predicate, it was not matched and consumed). The second Word is for your name or whatever.
Hope that helps.
Related
My regex pattern looks something like
<xxxx location="file path/level1/level2" xxxx some="xxx">
I am only interested in the part in quotes assigned to location. Shouldn't it be as easy as below without the greedy switch?
/.*location="(.*)".*/
Does not seem to work.
You need to make your regular expression lazy/non-greedy, because by default, "(.*)" will match all of "file path/level1/level2" xxx some="xxx".
Instead you can make your dot-star non-greedy, which will make it match as few characters as possible:
/location="(.*?)"/
Adding a ? on a quantifier (?, * or +) makes it non-greedy.
Note: this is only available in regex engines which implement the Perl 5 extensions (Java, Ruby, Python, etc) but not in "traditional" regex engines (including Awk, sed, grep without -P, etc.).
location="(.*)" will match from the " after location= until the " after some="xxx unless you make it non-greedy.
So you either need .*? (i.e. make it non-greedy by adding ?) or better replace .* with [^"]*.
[^"] Matches any character except for a " <quotation-mark>
More generic: [^abc] - Matches any character except for an a, b or c
How about
.*location="([^"]*)".*
This avoids the unlimited search with .* and will match exactly to the first quote.
Use non-greedy matching, if your engine supports it. Add the ? inside the capture.
/location="(.*?)"/
Use of Lazy quantifiers ? with no global flag is the answer.
Eg,
If you had global flag /g then, it would have matched all the lowest length matches as below.
Here's another way.
Here's the one you want. This is lazy [\s\S]*?
The first item:
[\s\S]*?(?:location="[^"]*")[\s\S]* Replace with: $1
Explaination: https://regex101.com/r/ZcqcUm/2
For completeness, this gets the last one. This is greedy [\s\S]*
The last item:[\s\S]*(?:location="([^"]*)")[\s\S]*
Replace with: $1
Explaination: https://regex101.com/r/LXSPDp/3
There's only 1 difference between these two regular expressions and that is the ?
The other answers here fail to spell out a full solution for regex versions which don't support non-greedy matching. The greedy quantifiers (.*?, .+? etc) are a Perl 5 extension which isn't supported in traditional regular expressions.
If your stopping condition is a single character, the solution is easy; instead of
a(.*?)b
you can match
a[^ab]*b
i.e specify a character class which excludes the starting and ending delimiiters.
In the more general case, you can painstakingly construct an expression like
start(|[^e]|e(|[^n]|n(|[^d])))end
to capture a match between start and the first occurrence of end. Notice how the subexpression with nested parentheses spells out a number of alternatives which between them allow e only if it isn't followed by nd and so forth, and also take care to cover the empty string as one alternative which doesn't match whatever is disallowed at that particular point.
Of course, the correct approach in most cases is to use a proper parser for the format you are trying to parse, but sometimes, maybe one isn't available, or maybe the specialized tool you are using is insisting on a regular expression and nothing else.
Because you are using quantified subpattern and as descried in Perl Doc,
By default, a quantified subpattern is "greedy", that is, it will
match as many times as possible (given a particular starting location)
while still allowing the rest of the pattern to match. If you want it
to match the minimum number of times possible, follow the quantifier
with a "?" . Note that the meanings don't change, just the
"greediness":
*? //Match 0 or more times, not greedily (minimum matches)
+? //Match 1 or more times, not greedily
Thus, to allow your quantified pattern to make minimum match, follow it by ? :
/location="(.*?)"/
import regex
text = 'ask her to call Mary back when she comes back'
p = r'(?i)(?s)call(.*?)back'
for match in regex.finditer(p, str(text)):
print (match.group(1))
Output:
Mary
I have been using strapplyc in R to select different portions of a string that match one particular set of criteria. These have worked successfully until I found a portion of the string where the required portion could be defined one of two ways.
Here is an example of the string which is liberally sprinkled with \t:
\t\t\tsome words here\t\t\tDefect: some more words here Action: more words
I can write the strapply statement to capture the text between Defect: and the start of Action:
strapplyc(record[i], "Defect:(.*?)Action")
This works and selects the chosen text between Defect: and Action. In some cases there is no action section to the string and I've used the following code to capture these cases.
strapplyc(record[i], "Defect:(.*?)$")
What I have been trying to do is capture the text that either ends with Action, or with the end of the string (using $).
This is the bit that keeps failing. It returns nothing for either option. Here is my failing code:
strapplyc(record[i], "Defect:(.*?)Action|$")
Any idea where I'm going wrong, or a better solution would be much appreciated.
If you are up for a more efficient solution, you could drop the .*? matching and unroll your pattern like:
Defect:((?:[^A]+|A(?!ction))*)
This matches Defect: followed by any amount of characters that are not an A or are an A and not followed by ction. This avoids the expanding that is needed for the lazy dot matching. It will work for both ways, as it does stop matching when it hits Action or the end of your string.
As suggested by Wiktor, you can also use
Defect:([^A]*(?:A(?!ction)[^A]*)*)
Which is a little bit faster when there are many As in the string.
You might want to consider to use A(?!ction:) or A(?!ction\s*:), to avoid false early matches.
The alternation operator | is the regex operator with the lowest precedence. That means the regex Defect:(.*?)Action|$ is actually a combination of Defect:(.*?)Action and $ - since an empty string is a valid match for $, your regex returns the empty string.
To solve that, you should combine the regexes Defect:(.*?)Action and Defect:(.*?)$ with an OR:
Defect:(.*?)Action|Defect:(.*?)$
Or you can enclose Action|$ in a group as Sebastian Proske said in the comments:
Defect:(.*?)(?:Action|$)
I found syntax like below.
${VARIABLE##*/}
what is the meaning of ##*/ in this?
I know meaning of */ in ls */ but not aware about what above syntax does.
This example will make it clear:
VARIABLE='abcd/def/123'
echo "${VARIABLE#*/}"
def/123
echo "${VARIABLE##*/}"
123
##*/ is stripping out longest match of anything followed by / from start of input.
#*/ is stripping out shortest match of anything followed by / from start of input.
PS: Using all capital variable names is not considered very good practice in Unix shell. Better to use variable instead of VARIABLE.
From man bash:
${parameter#word}
${parameter##word}
Remove matching prefix pattern. The word is expanded to produce
a pattern just as in pathname expansion. If the pattern matches
the beginning of the value of parameter, then the result of the
expansion is the expanded value of parameter with the shortest
matching pattern (the ``#'' case) or the longest matching pat‐
tern (the ``##'' case) deleted. If parameter is # or *, the
pattern removal operation is applied to each positional parame‐
ter in turn, and the expansion is the resultant list. If param‐
eter is an array variable subscripted with # or *, the pattern
removal operation is applied to each member of the array in
turn, and the expansion is the resultant list.
in Pyparsing, what are the differences between MatchFirst, Or, and oneOf
when there are shared characters in the strings like
word, wording, words
Or(['word', 'wording', 'words'])
MatchFirst(['word', 'wording', 'words'])
oneOf(['word', 'wording', 'words'])
From the online docs (https://pythonhosted.org/pyparsing/)
MatchFirst - If two expressions match, the first one listed is the one that will match.
Or - If two expressions match, the expression that matches the longest string will be used.
oneOf - Helper to quickly define a set of alternative Literals, and makes sure to do longest-first testing when there is a conflict, regardless of the input order, but returns a MatchFirst for best performance.
MatchFirst tests the current parse location with each string in its constructor, stopping at the first one to match.
Or tests the current parse location against all of the strings given in its constructor, and will return the longest match.
oneOf generates a Regex or MatchFirst to match the longest match, by reordering the input list when there are alternatives with common start strings to test the longer string first.
oneOf operates on str understood as space separated strings and can be simplistically defined as
oneOf = lambda xs: Or(Literal(x) for x in xs.split(" "))
While Or operates on expressions - ParseElement instances.
So you can see either oneOf as specialization of Or or Or being a generalization of oneOf.
You can write oneOf('foo bar') as Literal('foo') ^ Literal('bar')
but you can't write every Or expression using oneOf.
MatchFirst is the same as Or except conflict resolution method - Or yields the longest match while MatchFirst returns the first match in definition order.
So
expr = Literal('bar') ^ Words(alphanums)
expr.parseString("barstool").asList() == ["barstool"]
but
expr = Literal('bar') | Words(alphanums)
expr.parseString("barstool").asList() == ["bar"]
Using ASP.NET syntax for the RegularExpressionValidator control, how do you specify restriction of two consecutive characters, say character 'x'?
You can provide a regex like the following:
(\\w)\\1+
(\\w) will match any word character, and \\1+ will match whatever character was matched with (\\w).
I do not have access to asp.net at the moment, but take this console app as an example:
Console.WriteLine(regex.IsMatch("hello") ? "Not valid" : "Valid"); // Hello contains to consecutive l:s, hence not valid
Console.WriteLine(regex.IsMatch("Bar") ? "Not valid" : "Valid"); // Bar does not contain any consecutive characters, so it's valid
Alexn is right, this is the way you match consecutive characters with a regex, i.e. (a)\1 matches aa.
However, I think this is a case of everything looking like a nail when you're holding a hammer. I would not use regex to validate this input. Rather, I suggest validating this in code (just looping through the string, comparing str[i] and str[i-1], checking for this condition).
This should work:
^((?<char>\w)(?!\k<char>))*$
It matches abc, but not abbc.
The key is to use so called "zero-width negative lookahead assertion" (syntax: (?! subexpression)).
Here we make sure that a group matched with (?<char>\w) is not followed by itself (expressed with (?!\k<char>)).
Note that \w can be replaced with any valid set of characters (\w does not match white-spaces characters).
You can also do it without named group (note that the referenced group has number 2):
^((\w)(?!\2))*$
And its important to start with ^ and end with $ to match the whole text.
If you want to only exclude text with consecutive x characters, you may use this
^((?<char>x)(?!\k<char>)|[^x\W])*$
or without backreferences
^(x(?!x)|[^x\W])*$
All syntax elements for .NET Framework Regular Expressions are explained here.
You can use a regex to validate what's wrong as well as what's right of course. The regex (.)\1 will match any two consecutive characters, so you can just reject any input that gives an IsValid result to that. If this is the only validation you need, I think this way is far easier than trying to come up with a regex to validate correct input instead.