Regular Expressions

Hi everyone.

Just a question about regualar expression in Ruby. Is there a way to
check in each line of a document for always beginning with “23430000”
and somewhere on that same line another string ‘CodeRed’?

line1: 23430000 @#$#$3455000CodeRed 24AAWERE 740000000

This is what I have so far when I import each textdata from another
file.

textdata.should =~ /23430000/ |CodeRed/

…the pipe was supposed to determine if CodeRed exists somewhere after
the identity code 23430000. However, it doesn’t work like this. Also for
my code I am not using OR logic with it.

I’m not sure if this is what you are asking for, but /23430000.*CodeRed/
will match a line that contains ‘23430000’, followed by zero or more
characters, and then ‘CodeRed’.

try in IRB:

irb(main):001:0> line1 = ‘23430000 @#$#$3455000CodeRed 24AAWERE
740000000’
=> “23430000 @#$#$3455000CodeRed 24AAWERE 740000000”
irb(main):002:0> line1 =~ /23430000.*CodeRed/
=> 0
irb(main):003:0> line2 = ‘23430000 @#$#$3455000CodeGreen 24AAWERE
740000000’
=> “23430000 @#$#$3455000CodeGreen 24AAWERE 740000000”
irb(main):004:0> line2 =~ /23430000.*CodeRed/
=> nil

Regards,
Yaser S.

On Dec 1, 2008, at 1:08 PM, Mmcolli00 Mom wrote:

Hi everyone.

Hello.

Just a question about regualar expression in Ruby. Is there a way to
check in each line of a document for always beginning with “23430000”
and somewhere on that same line another string ‘CodeRed’?

Sure.

line1: 23430000 @#$#$3455000CodeRed 24AAWERE 740000000

This is what I have so far when I import each textdata from another
file.

textdata.should =~ /23430000/ |CodeRed/

textdata.should =~ /\A23430000.*CodeRed/

My changes are simple:

  • \A is a regex atom the only matches at the beginning of the input.
    I used this to make sure 23430000 is at the beginning of the line and
    not later.
  • .* matches zero or more of pretty much anything. Newlines are the
    only character excluded. Thus this allows anything to appear between
    the number and CodeRed.

Now the regex above really just checks one line. If you want to check
all lines, you’ll want something like:

textdata.each do |line|
line.should =~ /\A23430000.*CodeRed/
end

Hope that helps.

James Edward G. II

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 1:51 PM, Kyle S. [email protected]
wrote:

When you’ve got to build up some large regular expressions, this can
be a godsend, especially when revisiting code you haven’t looked at in
awhile.

–Kyle

Scratch that, not thinking clearly! This is to match startswith OR
codered, not necessarily both.

Still, I maintain that this is a way of staying sane with complex
regexes :slight_smile:

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 10:52 PM, Kyle S. [email protected]
wrote:

Still, I maintain that this is a way of staying sane with complex regexes
:slight_smile:

It certainly looks helpful. I didn’t know about it before. Thanks for
sharing :slight_smile:

Regards,
Yaser

Kyle S. wrote:

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 1:51 PM, Kyle S. [email protected]
wrote:

When you’ve got to build up some large regular expressions, this can
be a godsend, especially when revisiting code you haven’t looked at in
awhile.

–Kyle

Scratch that, not thinking clearly! This is to match startswith OR
codered, not necessarily both.

Still, I maintain that this is a way of staying sane with complex
regexes :slight_smile:

Alright. thanks for the tip. I was just thinking…what is the
regexpression for starts with anyway? I don’t know…I figured maybe I
could use union with the starts with expression and then just grab that
value.

thanks everyone!

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 1:08 PM, Mmcolli00 Mom [email protected]
wrote:

textdata.should =~ /23430000/ |CodeRed/

…the pipe was supposed to determine if CodeRed exists somewhere after
the identity code 23430000. However, it doesn’t work like this. Also for
my code I am not using OR logic with it.

Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

I just wanted to mention another way of combining regexes that may
help you stay sane: union.

#You write each regex nice and simple like…
startswith=/~23430000/
codered=/CodeRed/

#Then combine them to a complex one
combined_regex=Regexp.union(startswith,codered)

When you’ve got to build up some large regular expressions, this can
be a godsend, especially when revisiting code you haven’t looked at in
awhile.

–Kyle

On Dec 1, 2008, at 4:32 PM, Joe Wölfel wrote:

#Then combine them to a complex one
codered, not necessarily both.

Still, I maintain that this is a way of staying sane with complex
regexes :slight_smile:

Interesting that there is a union function but no intersection
function.

How would you even define a regexp (re) that matched only when both of
two other regexps (re1, re2) matched?

 class Regexp
   def self.intersection(re1,re2)
     union(compile(/(?>#{re1}).*#{re2}/),
           compile(/(?>#{re2}).*#{re1}/))
   end
 end

 re = Regexp.intersection(re1,re2)

What would you expect the value to be? And while Regexp.union is well-
behaved for multiple arguments, the expansion for more arguments in
the intersection gets ugly fast.

-Rob

Rob B. http://agileconsultingllc.com
[email protected]

Joe Wölfel wrote:

Interesting that there is a union function but no intersection function [for
regexen].

Well, the union of two regexen /foo/ and /bar/ is simply /foo|bar/, so
the
union method is rather easily implemented. An intersection method would
be
somewhat more complex. Of course that’s not really a reason not to
implement
it, but it might be the reason why it’s not implemented yet.

HTH,
Sebastian

On 1 déc. 08, at 14:52, Kyle S. wrote:

combined_regex=Regexp.union(startswith,codered)

Still, I maintain that this is a way of staying sane with complex
regexes :slight_smile:

Interesting that there is a union function but no intersection function.

On Dec 1, 2008, at 5:41 PM, Joe Wölfel wrote:

codered=/CodeRed/
–Kyle

Not sure I understand. Are you arguing that an intersection cannot
exist as a regular expression or merely that it is hard?

That it becomes combinatorially hard to construct such a regexp in
general. If I want a regexp that matches the intersection of /a/ and /
b/ and /c/ (i.e., contains each of ‘a’, ‘b’, and ‘c’), I have to
account for all the permutations (manually):
/a.*b.*c/
/a.*c.*b/
/b.*a.*c/
/b.*c.*a/
/c.*a.*b/
/c.*b.*a/

Or combined as: /(?:a.*(?:b.*c)|(?:c.b))|(?:b.(?:a.*c)|(?:c.a))|
(?:c.
(?:b.*a)|(?:a.*b))/

That’s nasty and so much worse than the union /[abc]/ or /a|b|c/ even
for this relatively simple case. It would be better to do this at the
application level if you can’t guarantee order:

[/a/, /b/, /c/].all? {|re| mystring =~ re }

And then the value of the match can be whatever the application wants
to track.

-Rob

On Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:08:16 -0500, Rob B. wrote:

#Then combine them to a complex one
codered, not necessarily both.
two other regexps (re1, re2) matched?
What would you expect the value to be? And while Regexp.union is well-
behaved for multiple arguments, the expansion for more arguments in the
intersection gets ugly fast.

It’s very well defined if you’re talking about an underlying
deterministic finite automaton. That’s an simple proof that is usually
assigned as an exercise for the student in a computer science theory
course.

If re1 compiles to a DFA dfa1=(S1,s1,A1,f1)
where S1 is the set of all states, s1 is the start state, A1 is the set
of accepting states, and f1(s’1,input) is the transition function
and re2 compiles to a DFA dfa2=(S2,s2,A2,f2)

Then the intersection of these two languages can be recognized by the
DFA
dfa3=(S1 x S2, (s1,s2), A1 x A2, f3)
where x means the cartesian product, and
f3((s’1,s’2),input)=(f1(s’1,input),f2(s’2,input))

Now, how you’d turn that back into a regexp is not so easy…
(but still doable)

–Ken

On 1 déc. 08, at 17:08, Rob B. wrote:

re = Regexp.intersection(re1,re2)

What would you expect the value to be? And while Regexp.union is
well-behaved for multiple arguments, the expansion for more
arguments in the intersection gets ugly fast.

-Rob

Rob B. http://agileconsultingllc.com
[email protected]

Not sure I understand. Are you arguing that an intersection cannot
exist as a regular expression or merely that it is hard?

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 7:08 PM, Mmcolli00 Mom [email protected]
wrote:

textdata.should =~ /23430000/ |CodeRed/

…the pipe was supposed to determine if CodeRed exists somewhere after
the identity code 23430000. However, it doesn’t work like this. Also for
my code I am not using OR logic with it.

I just simply have to pimp http://www.rubular.com/

I don’t think that I have closed that browser tab containing it in
weeks.
Its killer feature is the ability to supply your own test data.

/^23430000.CodeRed.$/