Regular expression question - match a template

Hello All!
I've put regex patterns to simple use b4, but this one I'm finding a bit of a challenge.
I need to match lines to the following template:
"9############ ###9,99 XXXXX####9,99 #9"In this template 9s mean digits, Xs mean alphanum characters and the #s mean optional digits.
For example the following strings must mutch the above pattern:
1. "123 18,10 abcde 9,99 1"
2. "1234567890123 1000,99 CCCCC 260,99 2"This is the regex I came up with so far.
"^[ \\d]{13}? [ \\d]{3}?\\d,\\d\\d .{5}?[ \\d]{4}\\d,\\d\\d [ \\d]\\d$"The problem with it of course is that it will match a string like:
1. "9 9 9 ,99 abcde 9 9,99 1"Basically, the question is whether it is possible to ensure that when the optional digits are
not present, they have the required spaces in their positions.
Any help is much appreciated.
P.s. the reason I am trying to use regex instead of splitting the string and validating the tokens
separately is because I have a number of such templates to validate lines against, and each template signals a particular line type. :) Basically I need to decide what type of line is it I just read from a file...
Thnx.

First of all, isn't the first digit mandatory?
That would mean that the first part of your regex should be:"^\\d"followed by 12 characters that can be either ' ' or any digit:"^\\d[ \\d]{12}"followed by space, three spaces or digits and a digit"^\\d[ \\d]{12} [ \\d]{3}\\d"comma, two digits, space, five alphanums"^\\d[ \\d]{12} [ \\d]{3}\\d,\\d{2} [\\w[^_]]{5}"4 space or digit, digit, comma, 2 digits"^\\d[ \\d]{12} [ \\d]{3}\\d,\\d{2} [\\w[^_]]{5}[ \\d]{4}\\d,\\d{2}"space, space or digit, digit, the end"^\\d[ \\d]{12} [ \\d]{3}\\d,\\d{2} [\\w[^_]]{5}[ \\d]{4}\\d,\\d{2} [ \\d]\\d$"And please note that the string you provided"9 9 9 ,99 abcde 9 9,99 1"is not supposed to match but the string"9 9,99 abcde 9,99 9"will.

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"Match Regular Expression" and "Match Pattern" vi's behave differently

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Thanks!
Solved!
Go to Solution.

Yep-
You hit a point that's frustrated me a time or two as well (and incidentally, caused some hair-pulling that I can ill afford)
The hint is in the help file:
for Match regular expression "The Match Regular Expression function gives you more options for matching
strings but performs more slowly than the Match Pattern function....Use regular
expressions in this function to refine searches....
Characters to Find
Regular Expression
VOLTS
VOLTS
A plus sign or a minus sign
[+-]
A sequence of one or more digits
[0-9]+
Zero or more spaces
\s* or * (that is, a space followed by an asterisk)
One or more spaces, tabs, new lines, or carriage returns
[\t \r \n \s]+
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cat, cag, cot, cog, dat, dag, dot, and dag
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dog, cat cat dog,cat
cat cat dog, and so on
((cat )*dog)
One or more of the letter a
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on
(a+) \1
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Regular Expression
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VOLTS
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Jeff

Regular Expressions - Questions to SME

Ralph Benzinger presented an online meetup on the topic of Regular Expressions. The presentation (slides only) can be found <a href="http://www.sdn.sap.comhttp://www.sdn.sap.comhttp://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/servlet/prt/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/866072ca-0b01-0010-54b1-9c02a45ba8aa">here</a>
Unfortunately the recording is not going to be available, but Ralph has been generous enough to agree to answer questions posted to this sticky thread.
cheers,
Marilyn

Hello Peter,
You're welcome!
Alas, I was unable to locate the regex documentation on help.sap.com either. In fact, I'm not even sure it has already been updated for 2004s. I recommend that you use the online documentation within the system, e.g., from transactions SE38 or SE80. Do an index search for "regex", and you'll be directed to REGEX, FIND and REGEX, REPLACE, both of which have extensive subsections on regexes.
The class cx_sy_regex is an exception class that is thrown by FIND, REPLACE and cl_abap_regex in case of an invalid regex, such as ".\1" (there is no capture group that back reference \1 can refer to). If the pattern is known statically, the syntax check will report this error, but for statements like "FIND REGEX pat IN text.", the actual pattern is only known at runtime.
The cx_sy_matcher class (and its subclasses) similarly indicate some invalid states, for example trying to call "cl_abap_matcher->replace_found( )" when the matcher has no current match to replace (e.g., replace_found( ) called twice in a row).
Please let me know if I can provide some additional information.
Regards
Ralph

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Kayaman wrote:
Why not use a better way than regex, like an actual HTML parser (or XML if you have it well-formed)? People seem to love parsing (or rather, asking help how to parse) HTML with regex for some unknown reason.Indeed.
Read this (hilarious):
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454

Urgent!!! Problem in regular expression for matching braces

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For the example below, can I write a regular expression to store getting key, value pairs.
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C:\usr\schodtt\src\java\forum\n00b\regex>

Regular Expression Question

Hi all,
I am suffering in java regular expression, and I hope you guys can help me out. I want to use the String api ".matches" to find out any string pattern like "xxxx.xxxx" where xxx can be only english word(both upper and lower case). Actually I will use this kind of expression to represent the cross join SQL statement in my java class, like "tableA.name = tableB.name", where they should be english letter only. I tried to use MyString.matches("^[A-Z] + \\. + ^[A-Z]") in my java program, but seem it doesn't work. Can you guys figure out the right expression for me ?? Many thanks
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Thanks for your prompt response, I tried your code, however, it doesn't work out.
I put your code like the following:
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Regular Expression Question, Repetition Operators

These are my success entries for a field;
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i'm using java to build a parser. im getting an expression, which i split on a white-space.
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Instead of splitting on whitespace to get a list of tokens, use Matcher.find() to match the tokens themselves: import java.util.*;
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How to form a regular expression for matching the xml tag?

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give this code a try
public class Test {
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These are my success entries for a field;
123456,
123456,123456,
123456,123456,123456,
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"," seperated 6 digits can be repeated unlimited times.
I found on documentation this; "Repetition Operators; {m,} Match at least m times" and for my need i tried this regular expression; "^[[[:digit:]]{6},]{1,}$", but didnt worked :(
Any comments?
Thank you very much :)
Tonguc

Your expression is a little incorrect because you can't use repetition operators within a bracket expression. How about something like this
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Regards,
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Jean-Pierre Drolet wrote in message news:<[email protected]>...
> The regular expression is "\[[~\]]*\]" which means:
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