Anyone know regex?

General General Questions
1

Does anyone here know how to do some relatively simple regex (regular expressions) strings?



Example I have a list like this:

~one,

~two,

~three,

~four,

~five,



Then using a simple regex to remove the backspaces with find and replace:



Find: ~

Replace: \b



To make the list look like this:

one,two,three,four,five,

2

Found and translated into PHP code with RegexBuddy 3 app.



First search for and remove all “~” with “”.



Then you’ll have



one,

two,

three,

four,

five,



Then replace “\r\n” with “”.



Then you’ll have



one,two,three,four,five,



$result = preg_replace(‘/\r\n/’, ‘’, preg_replace(‘/~/’, ‘’, $subject));

3

Hey Matt, Thanks for the help and code, I’m using EditPadPro, I got your example to work but I don’t know how to tell,with regex, to ignore blank lines? example:



one,

two,

three,



four,

five,



should create:



one,two, three



four,five



so four,five would stay on their own line as where as your solution works but merges all onto one line like one,two,three,four,five ect…if that makes sense.

4

Actually, I just tested it with the one above and it worked just the same. The one above removes all returns and even double ones.

screenshots.jpg

5

This regular expression tells it to find all (1 or more) instances of \r, \n, and ~ and replace them with an zero length string. The /s tells it to treat everything as if it were one line.



$result = preg_replace(/[\r\n~]+/s, ‘’, $subject);

6

thanks for your help guys, the explanations make sense, however I still can’t get the regex code to ignore blank lines, Matt, I looked at your screenshot and it still looks like it’s throwing everything onto 1 line, maybe I’m not makign sense…lol



I want:



line one,

line two,

line three,

(regex ignore this space)

line four,

line five,

line six,



to look like:



line one,line two,line three,

(regex ignore this space)

line four,line five,line six,

7

thanks for your help guys, the explanations make sense, however I still can’t get the regex code to ignore blank lines, Matt, I looked at your screenshot and it still looks like it’s throwing everything onto 1 line, maybe I’m not making sense…lol



I want:



line one,

line two,

line three,

(regex ignore this space)

line four,

line five,

line six,



to look like:



line one,line two,line three,

(regex ignore this space)

line four,line five,line six,

8

I kinda have it working but it’s a little ghetto…

9

You’ve offered a couple of different formats for source list, so working on the assumption you want to turn:



~one,

~two,

~three,

~four,

~five,

– blank line –

~six,

~seven



To:

one, two, three, four, five,

– blank line –

six, seven



$find = array(
"/~/s",
"/(,[\r\n]+)/sU",
);
$replace = array(
'',
','
);
$str = preg_replace($find, $replace, $str);




The code above doesn’t leave spaces between the commas… the following change should give you the spacing:


$find = array(
"/~/s",
"/(,[\r\n]+)/sU",
);
$replace = array(
'',
', '
);
$str = preg_replace($find, $replace, $str);

10

Thanks guys, i’m sorry for not being clear, I’m not using this in a php file, I’m converting the data from large .txt files in a basic regex capable text editor, I figured out a way that works but havn’t been able to stop it from removing blank lines, I’ve been using:



Search string: ,\r\n

Replace String: ,



and so far this turns:



line one,

line two,

line three,

– blank line –

line four,

line five,

line six,



into:



line one,line two,line three,

line four,line five,line six,



but I want it to look like:



line one,line two,line three,

– blank line –

line four,line five,line six,

11

If you still have at least one line you can replace on a second round with



Search String: \r\n

Replace String \r\n\r\n



If (P) represents one \r\n in



line one,line two,line three,(P)

line four,line five,line six,



Then it should add another line in between.