Word – Greedy match in MS Word regular expression

microsoft-word-2010regex

I need to clean up some tables in Word, where semicolons and text after them is redundant, e.g.

text1 ; text 2

where above is a content of one cell and I need to remove semicolon and everything after it until end of cell; unfortunately text 2 doesn't have any specific pattern.

I try to do that with Word's built-in find and replace using regex.

As the desired end of my regular expression is the end of the cell, I can't match it, I've tried several combinations of any character ;?* ;* ;?@ but all stops at the shortest matching text, is there a way to make it match until end of cell?

Best Answer

This seems to be working:

;[!¤]{1,}

I used generic currency sign ¤, you may use any other symbol you are sure is not included in text following semicolon (maybe it's semicolon itself).

Just a note: leaving curly brackets' second bound empty does not mean an endless string, I found out by trial that the extent is limited to 255 chars.

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Regular Expressions: How is group matching useful

In the lesson you linked to, you are asked to write a regex that captures the file name of these two

file_a_record_file.pdf
file_yesterday.pdf

and skips

testfile_fake.pdf.tmp

The simplest regex to do that is

(.*)\.pdf$

This means match everything that ends in .pdf but capture only the file name.

So, why is capturing useful? That depends on the program you are using these regexes with. Capturing patterns allows you to save what you have captured as a variable. For example, using Perl, the first captured pattern is $1, the second $2 etc:

echo "Hello world" | perl -ne '/(.+) (.+)/; print "$2 $1\n"'

This will print "world Hello" because the first parenthesis captured Hello and the second captured world but we are then printing $2 $1 so the two matches are inverted.

Other regex implementations allow you to refer to the captured patterns using \1, \2 etc. For example, GNU sed:

echo "Hello world" | sed 's/\(.*\) \(.*\)/\2 \1/'

So, in general, capturing patterns is useful when you need to refer to these patterns later on. This is known as referencing and is briefly explained a little later in the tutorials you are doing.

Best Answer

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Regular Expressions: How is group matching useful

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