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Just to complete things, I also wanted to pick up the other bit of text at the other end. That is, given:
yapyapyap ["fred"] moreyapyap I want to get the closing double quote through the closing square bracket whether there's white space between them or not. I did that using alternation as in this regular expression:
("]|"\s*])
It probably doesn't teach anyone anything they don't know already but I thought it would be worth a mention if only to complete what I need to do.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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Given an input string like this:
Some text containing % complete and not much else
If I use a regex of \bcomplete\b I can find the whole word complete just fine. What I want to do is find % complete. I've tried \b% complete\b and \b\% complete\b and \b\x25 complete\b and other variations I can think of but I can never get it to select % complete. Does anyone know if it's possible to do it and how? I can find nothing anywhere that says % cannot participate in an expression.
I've tried two different apps, such as RegexBuilder and RegexBuddy but I can't get it working in either. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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The % character won't work with the \b anchor. From MSDN:
The \b anchor specifies that the match must occur on a boundary between a word character (the \w language element) and a non-word character (the \W language element). Word characters consist of alphanumeric characters and underscores; a non-word character is any character that is not alphanumeric or an underscore. The match may also occur on a word boundary at the beginning or end of the string.
If you're using .NET, you could try something like:
((?<=\W)|^)%\s+\bcomplete\b
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Richard, I will try your example. I did though find the answer and indeed, the % has to be outside the \b symbols.
So, %~\bcomplete\b worked but \b%~complete\b did not. I use the tilde ~ to illustrate where a space character would be but it's not part of the expression itself.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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Have you tried:
%\scomplete
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
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OG, that works partly fine but it will also detect % completehorses whereas I must only find the whole word % complete only.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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Sorry! 
Did you try combining it with your solution?
%\s\bcomplete\b
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
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OG, the background is I've been assigned the wonderful job of localising the strings in our app. In total, we have about 23,000 split over several projects. I'm using an extractor tool called lingobit and it lets you put in filters to eliminate specific strings. Once I've harvested the strings and the regex format you run the scan and it discards all strings that match the regex. In theory, you are then left with the strings to be localised and it will assign names to them and change the code while creating the resx file. There are a number of projects to be converted. Once I've eliminated the strings we don't want to convert I can then reuse the regex pattern on another project and add any additional patterns as I go along.
In effect then, the regex string is input to a third-party app. It just takes a while to harvest all the things that musn't be converted. 
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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By the way, the thing I found most terrible when doing globalization/localization was string concatenation. I.e. something like
label1.Text = "Progress: " + n + " % complete";
instead of
label1.Text = string.Format("Progress: {0} % complete", n);
The translators will need the whole phrase for a useful translation, not single words, I had to change a few hundred such concatenations.
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F*** off! Tell me it ain't so, Bernard. 
Seriously, I have the same problem. There are few string.Format calls and 98% is concatenation. The context of the strings is the problem. I mean, there are sql statements containing strings like " and " and elsewhere there are messages boxes with " and ". There was one bastard of a string set to "Enter the " + something else and further on was something like reply.StartsWith("Enter the credit"). What a***hole would produce such awful stuff? And no, it wasn't me. 
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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"Nice" to hear that those problems are so common.
Apart from SQL statements, we excluded the log messages from localization - they' be more than the "normal" texts. That meant quite some extra work. That's a point to consider - or do you want to analyse log files in e.g. Hungarian?
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Bernhard Hiller wrote: or do you want to analyse log files in e.g. Hungarian?
We're starting with Italian and trying to restrict the text to what the users would expect or want to see. It's tricky trying to identify the context of a string so if later end up writing Simplified Chinese to a log file then so be it. I don't think our users would want to see a message box containing an sql statement. Oh wait (slapping forehead) they already do get some of those.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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Programming is one industry where everyone is constantly attempting to specialize in generalizing!!!!
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BTW: Get a copy of Expresso [^] - it's free, and it examines, explains and generates Regular expressions. I wish I'd written it!
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
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OG, thanks for the heads-up on the app. I already use RegexBuilder and RegexBuddy but you can't have too many regex tools in your toolbox. They bring different toys to the party and they're all helpful. I will download Expresso post-haste.
Update: Downloaded and quickly tried it out and the design mode tab looks very promising indeed.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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OG, as a follow up I spent a bit of time this evening using Expresso and I'm very impressed. Another tool I also use is RegexBuilder[^] (by Matt Jacobsen and Markus Renschler). While it's not a regex designer like Expresso it is an excellent parser-cum-tester.
You paste in or edit a regex string and you can create from 2 - 15 text lines. For example, I might create multiple lines showing variations of input text to be inspected. The moment you change the text or the regex you get an immediate colour change of the success or failure of the validation status on a particular line of sample text. That's useful if you are interested in specific strings. It's free which is nice.
I have a paid-for utility as well. So the three complement each other. For designing expressions, Expresso will be my striker, RegexBuddy my midfielder and RegexBuilder in defence.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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I want Regular Expression or any other validation for textbox to allow combination of character with digits only.. which can not be allow only digits or only character.
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U can use
^[a-zA-Z0-9]+ (\\d+ | [a-zA-Z]+)
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This is not a good regex task - it isn't strictly pattern matching, it's a counting job, which regex is pretty bad at.
While you can do it it would be horribly complex, and if you decided at a later date that you wanted to include special characters in there it would be a real PITA to maintain.
Instead, do it in code: Use two regexes - one to return all the digits, and one to return all the alpha characters. You then check that the length of both is greater than zero.
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.
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Assuming you're using the .NET RegEx class, you can use a zero-width positive lookahead assertion[^]:
^(?=.*?\d)(?=.*?\D)\w{2,}$
This means:
- You're matching the entire string -
^ and $ - The string must consist of at least two alpha-numeric characters -
\w{2,} - The string must contain any number of characters followed by a digit -
(?=.*?\d) - The string must contain any number of characters followed by a character that is not a digit -
(?=.*?\D)
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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please, tell me this has a bug:
"^(((0[1-9]|[12]\\d|3[01])\\/(0[13578]|1[02])\\/((19|[2-9]\\d)\\d{2}))|((0[1-9]|[12]\\d|30)\\/(0[13456789]|1[012])\\/((19|[2-9]\\d)\\d{2}))|((0[1-9]|1\\d|2[0-8])\\/02\\/((19|[2-9]\\d)\\d{2}))|(29\\/02\\/((1[6-9]|[2-9]\\d)(0[48]|[2468][048]|[13579][26])|((16|[2468][048]|[3579][26])00))))$"
I'm brazilian and english (well, human languages in general) aren't my best skill, so, sorry by my english. (if you want we can speak in C# or VB.Net =p)
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That's a very long expression.
This is a shorter expression that validate dates:
^\d{4}[- /.](0?[1-9]|1[0-2])[- /.](0?[1-9]|[12][1-9]|3[01])$
Expresso[^] is a good tool to create regular expressions.
In some cases, my signature will be longer than my message...
<em style="color:red"> <b>ProgramFOX</b></em> ProgramFOX
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thanks for the reply, we actually found a bug on that expression when entering 01/01/2013 (dd/MM/yyyy), for some reason, this value was rejected...
I'm brazilian and english (well, human languages in general) aren't my best skill, so, sorry by my english. (if you want we can speak in C# or VB.Net =p)
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Sentenryu wrote: thanks for the reply
You're welcome!
Sentenryu wrote: dd/MM/yyyy
My expression is for yyyy/MM/dd. An expression for dd/MM/yyyy:
^(0?[1-9]|[12][1-9]|3[01])[- /.](0?[1-9]|1[0-2])[- /.]\d{4}$
In some cases, my signature will be longer than my message...
<em style="color:red"> <b>ProgramFOX</b></em> ProgramFOX
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