Regular Expressions, Examples of actions with Regular Expressions Options

[DetlevD]

Convert from RFC822/1123 Date string to ISO-8601 Date string.

Examples:
RFC822/RFC 1123 ==> ISO-8601
1 Feb 2009 ==> 2009-02-01
30 Sep 2010 ==> 2010-09-30

$replace($regexp($right('0'%YEAR%,11),'(\d{1,2}) (Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Jun|Jul|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec) (\d{2,4})','$3-$2-$1'),'Jan','01','Feb','02','Mar','03','Apr','04','May','05','Jun','06','Jul','07','Aug','08','Sep','09','Oct','10','Nov','11','Dec','12')

See also:
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc822/
http://www.freesoft.org/CIE/RFC/1123/99.htm

DD.20110801.0623.CEST

This post has been edited by DetlevD: Aug 1 2011, 05:20

[DetlevD]

How to copy a list of artists and their roles ...
... from tag-field COMMENT
... to tag-field INVOLVEDPEOPLE

Example 1
From: COMMENT
Person1:Role1
Person2:Role2
Person3:Role3
To: INVOLVEDPEOPLE
Role1:Person1;Role2:Person2;Role3:Person3;

Action: Format value
Field: INVOLVEDPEOPLE
Formatstring:
$regexp(%COMMENT%$char(13),'(.+?):(.+?)[\r\n]+','$2:$1;')


Example 2
From: COMMENT
Person1:Role1
Person2: Role2a,Role2b
Person3 : Role3a, Role3b
Person4: Role4a & Role4b, Role4c
To: INVOLVEDPEOPLE
Role1:Person1;Role2a,Role2b:Person2;Role3a,Role3b:Person3;Role4a & Role4b,Role4c:Person4;

Action: Format value
Field: INVOLVEDPEOPLE
Formatstring:
$regexp($regexp(%COMMENT%$char(13),'(.+?)\s*:\s*(.+?)[\r\n]+','$2:$1;'),'\s*,\s*',',')

DD.20110824.1757.CEST

This post has been edited by DetlevD: Aug 24 2011, 16:55

[pone]

$regexp(%COMMENT%$char(13),'(.+?) :( .+?)[\r\n]+','$2:$1;')
...
$regexp($regexp(%COMMENT%$char(13),'(.+?)\s*:\s*(.+?)[\r\n]+','$2:$1;'),'\s*,\s*',',')

What is $char(13) ? And why is it needed here?

This post has been edited by pone: Aug 24 2011, 16:30

[DetlevD]

What is $char(13) ? And why is it needed here?

$char(13) is the "CarriageReturn" control character.
It is appended here on the fly to the COMMENT string as a helper, just to make sure, that there is at least one "CarriageReturn" character at the end of the COMMENT string, in order to let the RegExp work correctly, even for the case, when the original COMMENT string has no trailing CarriageReturn/LineFeed sequence.

DD.20110824.1750.CEST

[naisanza]

If you want to add TEXT to the existing tag:

Regular expression: (.*)
Replace with: TEXT \1 \0

I found that if you don't put in the \0 at the end it will repeat TEXT twice. For example:

Title: Texty text
Becomes: TEXT Texty textTEXT


I'm using v2.48. This might of been fixed in the later versions, but it's the version I've been using and some things I refuse to update to a newer version since I've never had any other issues with it except for this one bit of annoyance.

[RevRagnarok]

Regular expression: (.*)
Replace with: TEXT \1 \0

I found that if you don't put in the \0 at the end it will repeat TEXT twice. For example:

Title: Texty text
Becomes: TEXT Texty textTEXT

What seems to be happening is the "end of line" is being matched a second time for some reason.

Using 2.48, I duplicated your bug but also tweaked the RegEx to work properly.

Regular expression: ^(.*)$
Replace with: TEXT $1

That explicitly tells the engine not to include the newline in the match.

[dano]

It's not a bug.
It happens because global matching is activated by default.
That means the engine tries to match the regex pattern as many times as possible.

With (.*) the whole text is matched at first. Then the engine stands at the end of the text. And it tries to match the pattern again.
And it succeeds because .* also matches "nothing".


But I'd prefer a simple "Format value" action is for this task anyway.