arcster.com Blog » Regular Expressions

The never-ending awesomeness of regular expressions

arcster — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 20:05:33 +0000

So I had a bunch of names and for privacy purposes I wanted to abbreviate the last name to show only the first letter. Hours of tedious work, right? Wrong!

I put this in the find what box of Dreamweaver
([A-Z]{1})([a-z]{3,})
And this in the Replace With box
$1
And I was good to go!

Of course, I could also have dumped the names into Excel and done a Left function on them… I guess there are lots of ways to skin that cat.

Quick Linux/regexp tips

arcster — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:00:51 +0000

To get info on your environment: env

to do a case-insensitive searc for .pm files in /usr and subfolders:
find /usr -iname '*.pm'
To get a terminal type xfce4-terminal in the Alt+F2 box

To find a string of alpha characters between 100 and 200 characters long in finnwake.txt:

grep "[A-Za-z]\{100,200\}" finnwake.txt

To find words between 25 and 30 characters without vowels:

grep -w "[^aeiouy]\{25,30\}" finnwake.txt

to exit a MAN screen, use q

to page down in a MAN screen, use f

to page up in a MAN screen, use b

Find and replace for fixed width text in Microsoft Word

arcster — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:57:12 +0000

If you have rows of fixed-width data (in this case the first 12 characters of each row) and you want to put a tab at the end, put this in your “Find what” box in Microsoft Word:

(^13*{12})

and put this in the “Replace With” box:

\1^t

and check the Use Wildcards option

The “^13″ is a newline character (^p doesn’t work when using wildcards)

Cool Find and Replace using regexp

arcster — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:21:37 +0000

So I saved an Excel file as a tab-separated text file. Then I wanted to add some html. The first column was all numbers followed by a tab and the second column.

I opened the text file in Dreamweaver and put the following in the “Find” box: \n([0-9]+)\t

That says “Look for a line break followed by a subexpression containing at least one numeric character followed by a tab”

I put the following in the Replace box: \n

That says “Replace it with a line break followed by a div tag followed by the subexpression (i.e, the number) followed by a closing div followed by an opening div for col2 followed by a tab”

Then the check the “Use regular expression” checkbox and hit “Replace All”

Quirky behavior noted: I couldn’t do one-at-a-time replacements. It only worked when I did Replace All. So make sure you have a back up handy.