I trying to formulate a regular expression which will match only those strings which are made up of only 3 types of characters: tab, space and new line. For ex.
String1 = " \t "
String2 = "\n\n"
String3 = " \t \n \n \n "
All above strings should match the regular expression.
I tried this : %r/[ \n]+/
But this is also matching strings having space and new line but apart from those many other characters also, like
string4 = " I am a boy \n"
My expression is also match string4 which it should not match.
I am not able to fix it. It will be great if someone could come up with a solution to fix this.
You need to tell the regex that the WHOLE string must fit, rather than part of a string. Do this with the ^ and $ operators, which mean 'start of file' and 'end of file' respectively:
/^[\t\n ]+$/
This site, and sites like it, can be useful:
http://regex101.com/
Related
I'm doing a bash script and I have a problem. I would like to change the position of two characters in a string.
My input is the following:
"aaaaa_eeeee"
The desired output is:
"eeeee_aaaaa"
I don't want to invert the string or anything else like that, what I need is to replace the character "a" by the "e" and the "e" by the "a". I have tried to make a echo "aaaaa_eeeee" | tr "a" "e . The first replacement is simple but the second one I don't know how to do it.
You can give multiple original and replacement characters to tr. Each character in the original string is replaced with the corresponding replacement character.
echo "aaaaa_eeeee" | tr "ae" "ea"
Pass Translation Sets as Arguments
To make the substitutions work in a single logical pass, you need to pass multiple characters to the tr utility. The man page for the BSD version of tr describes the use of translation sets as follows:
[T]he characters in string1 are translated into the characters in string2 where the first character in string1 is translated into the first character in string2 and so on. If string1 is longer than string2, the last character found in string2 is duplicated until string1 is exhausted.
For example:
$ tr "ae" "ea" <<< "aaaaa_eeeee"
eeeee_aaaaa
This maps a => e and e => a in a single logical pass, avoiding the issues that would result in trying to map the replacements sequentially.
This is a job for rev:
echo "aaaaa_eeeee"|rev
eeeee_aaaaa
My string:
a = "Please match spaces here <but not here>. Again match here <while ignoring these>"
Using Ruby's regex flavor, I would like to do something like:
a.gsub /regex_pattern/, '_'
And obtain:
"Please_match_spaces_here_<but not here>._Again_match_here_<while ignoring these>"
This should do it:
result = subject.gsub(/\s+(?![^<>]*>)/, '_')
This regex assumes there's nothing tricky like escaped angle brackets. Also be aware that \s matches newlines, TABs and other whitespace characters as well as spaces. That's probably what you want, but you have the option of matching only spaces:
/ +(?![^<>]*>)/
I think, it works:
a = "Please match spaces here <but not here>. Again match here <while ignoring these>"
pattern = /<(?:(?!<).)*>/
a.gsub(pattern, '')
# => "Please match spaces here . Again match here "
I'm trying to do a regex with lookbehind that changes \n to but not if it's a \\n.
My closest attempt has no effect:
text.gsub /(?<!\\)\n/, ''
Unfortunately, no number of backslashes in the lookbehind seem to fix the problem. How can I address this?
You need to double the backslash before the n in the regex, otherwise it's looking for a newline instead of a literal backslash followed by n:
irb(main):001:0> puts "hello\\nthere\\\\n".gsub(/(?<!\\)\\n/, ' ')
hello there\\n
You don't need anything special. "\n" is a single character. It does not include a "\" or "n" character.
text.gsub(/\n/, "")
But instead of that, you should do:
text.gsub("\n", "")
or
text.tr("\n", "")
But I would do:
text.tr($/, "")
I have a string that looks like this.
mystring="The Body of a\r\n\t\t\t\tSpider"
I want to replace all the \r, \n, \t etc with a whitespace.
The code I wrote for this is :
mystring.gsub(/\\./, " ")
But this isn't doing anything to the string.
Help.
\r, \n and \t are escape sequences representing carriage return, line feed and tab. Although they are written as two characters, they are interpreted as a single character:
"\r\n\t".codepoints #=> [13, 10, 9]
Because it is such a common requirement, there's a shortcut \s to match all whitespace characters:
mystring.gsub(/\s/, ' ')
#=> "The Body of a Spider"
Or \s+ to match multiple whitespace characters:
mystring.gsub(/\s+/, ' ')
#=> "The Body of a Spider"
/\s/ is equivalent to /[ \t\r\n\f]/
String#tr is designed for stream symbol substitution. It appears to be a bit quickier, than String#gsub:
mystring.tr "\r", ' '
It hasan insplace version also (this will replace all carriage returns, line feed and spaces with space):
mystring.tr! "\s\r\n\t\f", ' '
Stefen's Answer is really very Cool as always comeup with very short and clean solutions. But here what I tried to remove all special characters. [Posted as just optional solution] ;)
> a = "The Body of a\r\n\t\t\t\tSpider"
=> "The Body of a\r\n\t\t\t\tSpider"
> a.gsub(/[^0-9A-Za-z]/, ' ')
=> "The Body of a Spider"
you can use strip , then add a space to your string
mystring.strip . " "
If you literally has \r\n\t in your string:
mystring="The Body of a\r\n\t\t\t\tSpider"
mystring.split(/[\r\t\n]/)
cud any body tell me how this expression works
output = "#{output.gsub(/grep .*$/,'')}"
before that opearation value of ouptput is
"df -h | grep /mnt/nand\r\n/dev/mtdblock4 248.5M 130.7M 117.8M 53% /mnt/nand\r\n"
but after opeartion it comes
"df -h | \n/dev/mtdblock4 248.5M 248.5M 130.7M 117.8M 53% /mnt/nand\r\n "
plzz help me
Your expression is equivalent to:
output.gsub!(/grep .*$/,'')
which is much easier to read.
The . in the regular expression matches all characters except newline by default. So, in the string provided, it matches "grep /mnt/nand", and will substitute a blank string for that. The result is the provided string, without the matched substring.
Here is a simpler example:
"hello\n\n\nworld".gsub(/hello.*$/,'') => "\n\n\nworld"
In both your provided regex, and the example above, the $ is not necessary. It is used as an anchor to match the end of a line, but since the pattern immediately before it (.*) matches everything up to a newline, it is redundant (but does not cause harm).
Since gsub returns a string, your first line is exactly the same as
output = output.gsub(/grep .*$/, '')
which takes the string and removes any occurance of the regexp pattern
/grep .*$/
i.e. all parts of the string that start with 'grep ' until the end of the string or a line break.
There's a good regexp tester/reference here. This one matches the word "grep", then a space, then any number of characters until the next line-break (\r or \n). "." by itself means any character, and ".*" together means any number of them, as many as possible. "$" means the end of a line.
For the '$', see here http://www.regular-expressions.info/reference.html
".*$" means "take every character from the end of the string" ; but the parser will interpret the "\n" as the end of a line, so it stops here.