How do I find some text but skip some other slightly different text?

Scott Nielson

@PeterJones How do I skip replacing a “hyphen” or “dash” if the is immediately after the “hyphen” or “dash” (for what I’ve posted right at the top)? Please tweak the RegEx so that it skips it. Thanks in advance for your help!

PeterJones

@Scott-Nielson ,

If you want to require at least one character after the hyphen, then why not make your regex require “1 or more” characters instead of “0 or more” characters after the hyphen: specifically, change (.*?) to (.+?)

----

Please note: This Community Forum is not a data transformation service; you should not expect to be able to always say “I have data like X and want it to look like Y” and have us do all the work for you. If you are new to the Forum, and new to regular expressions, we will often give help on the first one or two data-transformation questions, especially if they are well-asked and you show a willingness to learn; and we will point you to the documentation where you can learn how to do the data transformations for yourself in the future. But if you repeatedly ask us to do your work for you, you will find that the patience of usually-helpful Community members wears thin. The best way to learn regular expressions is by experimenting with them yourself, and getting a feel for how they work; having us spoon-feed you the answers without you putting in the effort doesn’t help you in the long term and is uninteresting and annoying for us.

Scott Nielson

@PeterJones Like you said, I used the RegEx, (?s)(?<=mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>)-(.+?) *(?=) and that skips finding the immediate next and finds the next one but I want the RegEx to skip replacing a “hyphen” or “dash” if the is immediately after the “hyphen” or “dash” (without any space in between) which means the (.+?) is not needed here. There’s a difference between “finding” and “replacing”. Please help!

Scott Nielson

@PeterJones When this is found: -), with no space in between, no replacement should happen.

PeterJones

@Scott-Nielson said in How do I find some text but skip some other slightly different text?:

(.+?)

change (.+?) => ((?:(?!).)+?) – this gets complicated, and you will need to study the manual and play with it to fully understand. But basically, the (?!) is a negative lookahead saying that the next characters cannot be , but doesn’t grab any; then the . following grabs the first character that doesn’t start . Then the ()+ says continuing doing this (grab one character as long as it isn’t the start if ) as long as I can.

PeterJones

This post is deleted!

Scott Nielson

@PeterJones Like you said, I used the RegEx, (?s)(?<=mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>)-((?:(?!).)+?) and that finds the hyphen/dash and the immediate next character (which is not what I want). I think, we need a RegEx with a (SKIP) in it.

PeterJones

@Scott-Nielson

You got rid of parts of your previous regex which I didn’t say to remove, which my answer assumed would still be used. If you really need SKIP, you’ll have to wait for someone else, because I have never understood it. But I personally don’t think you need it.

DATA =

mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>-blah blah blah</span> <!-- yes this one -->
mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>-</span> <!-- not this one -->
mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>- </span> <!-- unsure about this one -->

FIND = (?s)(?<=mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>)-((?:(?!).)+?) *(?=)

That seems to match what you said, where you want it to not match if it’s - with no space between; you weren’t clear whether it should match with a space in between; the one I had intended you to use (which I just showed) assumed one with hyphen space span should match, like in my screenshot. If not, then tweak it again to not allow spaces before the span

FIND = (?s)(?<=mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>)-((?:(?!\h*).)+?) *(?=)

At this point though, if you want more help, you will have to do a better job showing your problem – what you have, what you get, and what you actually want, without irrelevant bits – and do a better job of doing what we suggest; you will also have to wait for someone who knows FAIL, and has the ability to answer in ways that you will understand – so you’ll have to have patience while waiting for someone else to show up.

Scott Nielson

@PeterJones The RegEx you gave me worked like a charm and I’m happy with it but if someone does post about how to use SKIP and FAIL, it’d be nice.

Alan Kilborn

@Scott-Nielson

For what it’s worth, here are some links I’ve collected which discuss (*SKIP), (*FAIL), or both:

Scott Nielson

@Alan-Kilborn This RegEx, -(*SKIP)(*F)|(\a)|(?s)(?<=mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>)-(.*?) *(?=) skipped what I wanted it to and replaced only what I wanted it to. Thanks a million!

Scott Nielson

@Alan-Kilborn Sorry, that should be, -(*SKIP)(*F)|(?s)(?<=mso-ansi-language:EN-US'>)-(.*?) *(?=) - I forgot to copy the last RegEx and your system doesn’t let me edit what I post after 3 minutes!