how to find occurrence of special character using regex - python

I have an url like this
http://foo.com/bar_by_baz.html
now I want to extract baz from that URL using a regex. But so far I have managed to write this much only
[_]+?\w[^.]+
This is giving me
_by_baz
as output. Now I want to know that how can I select any special character exactly one time or what would be the best approach to solve this using regex ?
I am trying it on python 3.x

Here's your regex: [_]+?([^_.]+) the group match will return baz.. The concept is to isolate underscore and dot from the target match
In another case, this works based on capturing only the alphanumerics [_]+?([A-Za-z0-9]+)

I am going to assume from your profile that you are seeking a javascript-friendly solution (you should update your question & tags).
For javascript, you could use this pattern: /[^_]+(?=\.[a-z]+$)/
Demo Link The pattern matches the substring containing no underscores that is followed by a dot then one or more alphabetical characters until the end of the string.
There will be several ways to accomplish your task. Finding the best/most efficient one can only be achieved if you provide more information about the coding environment/language and a few more sample strings.

Related

python regex: match everything inside brackets including other brackets [duplicate]

In python, I can easily search for the first occurrence of a regex within a string like this:
import re
re.search("pattern", "target_text")
Now I need to find the last occurrence of the regex in a string, this doesn't seems to be supported by re module.
I can reverse the string to "search for the first occurrence", but I also need to reverse the regex, which is a much harder problem.
I can also iterate to find all occurrences from left to right, and just keep the last one, but that looks awkward.
Is there a smart way to find the rightmost occurrence?
One approach is to prefix the regex with (?s:.*) and force the engine to try matching at the furthest position and gradually backing off:
re.search("(?s:.*)pattern", "target_text")
Do note that the result of this method may differ from re.findall("pattern", "target_text")[-1], since the findall method searches for non-overlapping matches, and not all substrings which can be matched are included in the result.
For example, executing the regex a.a on abaca, findall would return aba as the only match and select it as the last match, while the code above will return aca as the match.
Yet another alternative is to use regex package, which supports REVERSE matching mode.
The result would be more or less the same as the method with (?s:.*) in re package as described above. However, since I haven't tried the package myself, it's not clear how backreference works in REVERSE mode - the pattern might require modification in such cases.
import re
re.search("pattern(?!.*pattern)", "target_text")
or
import re
re.findall("pattern", "target_text")[-1]
You can use these 2 approaches.
If you want positions use
x="abc abc abc"
print [(i.start(),i.end(),i.group()) for i in re.finditer(r"abc",x)][-1]
One approach is to use split. For example if you wanted to get the last group after ':' in this sample string:
mystr = 'dafdsaf:ewrewre:cvdsfad:ewrerae'
':'.join(mystr.split(':')[-1:])

Issues with re.search and unicode in python [duplicate]

I have been trying to extract certain text from PDF converted into text files. The PDF came from various sources and I don't know how they were generated.
The pattern I was trying to extract was a simply two digits, follows by a hyphen, and then another two digits, e.g. 12-34. So I wrote a simple regex \d\d-\d\d and expected that to work.
However when I test it I found that it missed some hits. Later I noted that there are at least two hyphens represented as \u2212 and \xad. So I changed my regex to \d\d[-\u2212\xad]\d\d and it worked.
My question is, since I am going to extract so many PDF that I don't know what other variations of hyphen are out there, is there any regex expression covering all "hyphens", and hopefully looks better than the [-\u2212\xad] expression?
The solution you ask for in the question title implies a whitelisting approach and means that you need to find the chars that you think are similar to hyphens.
You may refer to the Punctuation, Dash Category, that Unicode cateogry lists all the Unicode hyphens possible.
You may use a PyPi regex module and use \p{Pd} pattern to match any Unicode hyphen.
Or, if you can only work with re, use
[\u002D\u058A\u05BE\u1400\u1806\u2010-\u2015\u2E17\u2E1A\u2E3A\u2E3B\u2E40\u301C\u3030\u30A0\uFE31\uFE32\uFE58\uFE63\uFF0D]
You may expand this list with other Unicode chars that contain minus in their Unicode names, see this list.
A blacklisting approach means you do not want to match specific chars between the two pairs of digits. If you want to match any non-whitespace, you may use \S. If you want to match any punctuation or symbols, use (?:[^\w\s]|_).
Note that the "soft hyphen", U+00AD, is not included into the \p{Pd} category, and won't get matched with that construct. To include it, create a character class and add it:
[\xAD\p{Pd}]
[\xAD\u002D\u058A\u05BE\u1400\u1806\u2010-\u2015\u2E17\u2E1A\u2E3A\u2E3B\u2E40\u301C\u3030\u30A0\uFE31\uFE32\uFE58\uFE63\uFF0D]
This is also a possible solution, if your regex engine allows it
/\p{Dash}/u
This will include all these characters.

Python regex to exclude several words

I try to search for URLS and want to exclude some. In the variable download_artist I stored the base URL and wanto to find additional links, but not upload, favorites, followers or listens.
So I tried different versions with the mentioned words and a |. Like:
urls = re.findall(rf'^{download_artist}uploads/|{download_artist}^favorites/|^{download_artist}followers/|^{download_artist}listens/|{download_artist}\S+"', response.text, re.IGNORECASE)
or:
urls = re.findall(rf'{download_artist}^uploads/|^favorites/|^followers/|^listens/|\S+"', response.text, re.IGNORECASE)
But it ignores my ^ for excluding the words. Where is my mistake?
You need use "lookaround" in this case, can see more details in https://www.regular-expressions.info/lookaround.html.
So, i think wich this regex solve your problem:
{download_artist}(?!uploads/|favorites/|followers/|listens/)\S+\"
You can test if regex working in https://regex101.com/. This site is very useful when you work with regex.
^ only works as a negation in character classes inside [], outside it represents the beginning of the input.
I suggest you do two matches: One to match all urls and another one to match the ones to exclude. Then remove the second set of urls from the first one.
That will keep the regexes simple and readable.
If you have to do it in one regex for whatever reason you can try to solve it with (negative) lookaround pattern (see https://www.rexegg.com/regex-lookarounds.html).

Improving accuracy/brevity of regex for inconsistent url filtering

So, for some lulz, a friend and I were playing with the idea of filtering a list (100k+) of urls to retrieve only the parent domain (ex. "domain.com|org|etc"). The only caveat is that they are not all nice and matching in format.
So, to explain, some may be "http://www.domain.com/urlstuff", some have country codes like "www.domain.co.uk/urlstuff", while others can be a bit more odd, more akin to "hello.in.con.sistent.urls.com/urlstuff".
So, story aside, I have a regex that works:
import re
firsturl = 'www.foobar.com/fizz/buzz'
m = re.search('\w+(?=(\..{3}/|\..{2}\..{2}/))\.(.{3}|.{2}\..{2})', firsturl)
m.group(0)
which returns:
foobar.com
It looks up the first "/" at the end of the url, then returns the two "." separated fields before it.
So, my query, would anyone in the stack hive mind have any wisdom to shed on how this could be done with better/shorter regex, or regex that doesn't rely on a forward lookup of the "/" within the string?
Appreciation for all of the help in this!
I do think that regex is just the right tool for this. Regex is pattern matching, which is put to best use when you have a known pattern that might have several variations, as in this case.
In your explanation of and attempted solution to the problem, I think you are greatly oversimplifying it, though. TLDs come in many more flavors than "2-digit country codes" and "3-digit" others. See ICANN's list of top-level domains for the hundreds currently available, with lengths from 2 digits and up. Also, you may have URLs without any slashes and some with multiple slashes and dots after the domain name.
So here's my solution (see on regex101):
^(?:https?://)?(?:[^/]+\.)*([^/]+\.[a-z]{2,})
What you want is captured in the first matching group.
Breakdown:
^(?:https?://)? matches a possible protocol at the beginning
(?:[^/]+\.)* matches possible multiple non-slash sequences, each followed by a dot
([^/]+\.[a-z]{2,}) matches (and captures) one final non-slash sequence followed by a dot and the TLD (2+ letters)
You can use this regex instead:
import re
firsturl = 'www.foobar.com/fizz/buzz'
domain = re.match("(.+?)\/", firsturl).group()
Notice, though, that this will only work without 'http://'.

Negating match if a string is just before another string

I'm struggling to get a regex to work where it matches a certain pattern, so long as isn't proceeded by another. For example,
Accessory for MyProduct01 <<< Should be classified as an accessory
MyProduct01 with accessory << Should be classified as a product
So I need to add something to my 'accessory' regex, something like 'match "accessory" so long as the word before isn't "with"'.
I have seen some examples where people are using negative lookaheads to find if a word is anywhere in the string, but I want to be a bit more specific regarding the position of the word to negate. Something like:
(?!with\s)accessory
Just use a negative look-behind in your regex:
(?<!with\s)accessory
Since Python doesn't support unbounded lookbehinds, I think you are going to have to use a lookahead similar to what you are currently using, but change the original pattern a bit.
^(?!\bwith\b.*\baccessory\b)(?=.*\b(accessory)\b)
Here, the negative lookahead is used to ensure that "accessory" doesn't come after the word "with". Then, the positive lookahead is used to ensure that the word "accessory" occurs within the string, captured with a group if you need to capture it for some reason.
Based on the way that I wrote the above, you'd want to use the search method and not the match method. In order to use match, which requires that the entire search string match the pattern, you'd need to add a bit more to the pattern:
^(?!\bwith\b.*\baccessory\b)(?=.*\b(accessory)\b).*$

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