A question for regex experts, can't find the answer by myself (I looked !)
I have this :
good 0 df
good 1 dfd
good 2 qdqsd
good 3 ggr
bad 4
good 5 mlp
good 6
good 7
and want to get the context of "bad" with only one "good" before and one "good" after:
good 3 ggr
bad 4
good 5
the best I've got is
(?s)(good.{1,12}bad.*?good)
and it's not working because the range {1,12} is not consistent and fails
Thank you very much if you have a solution
this works for me:
\bgood.*\Rbad.*\Rgood.*
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer me !
But in fact I simplified too much my input text...sorry
Have you got a working solution for this one ? Thanks !
input text:
good 1 dfd
kjkkjdf
good 2 qdqsd
jkfkjg
skdlsk
good 3 ggrfdfdfd
dfklfd
dfkl
random length
with multiple lines
bad 4 sdjqklj random length
sd4s54 multiple lines
good 5 mlp
sldsklds
good 6
XXX
desired output:
good 3 ggrfdfdfd
dfklfd
dfkl
random length
with multiple lines
bad 4 sdjqklj random length
sd4s54 multiple lines
good
Don't you mean \bgood.\rbad.\rgood?
@ thoffman666
not working with the text : you can test things at https://regex101.com
@JMichaelTX
Thank you for all your posts everywhere in the forum. Without you sharing your knowledge It would have been so much more difficult.
I could not find a regex to do what I wanted...but I found an ugly solution with 3 different regex searches and variables...
Without any mean to capture a lookbehind or to specify a position in a string int the regex search I could not find any other way...
context Macro (v9.0.5)
context.kmmacros (4.1 KB)
There is nothing ugly about your solution.
While we often would like to have a single RegEx to get our desired solution, sometimes it is better, or we have to resort to, using a sequence of RegEx's, like you did.
This is actually a very challenging Regex problem. I thought the lookahead approach would work, but it does not work exactly like I originally thought.
I did finally find a single RegEx solution, but it requires that your source text have ONLY one block of text that is:
good
and then one or more lines
bad
and then one or more lines
good
This RegEx will match the LAST block of text that fits that pattern:
(?s)\bgood(?!.*?good.*?bad).*?\bbad.*?\bgood
For details, see: regex101: build, test, and debug regex
(ignore the first line of source text)
Brilliant! Thank you very much.
Do you think that for this kind of thing (string manipulations) the regex approach is inferior to applescript or any other language ?
In a word, no.
I think RegEx is one of the most powerful string manipulation tools available, and the great thing is that it works in a variety of applications and languages. I use RegEx a lot in:
\r means just the CR character.
\R (available since 10.11) means any line ending (so \r\n, \r or \n (or others)).
