Regular expressions: dealing with spaces
25 views (last 30 days)
Show older comments
Hi all,
I have different strings wich they differ from the number of spaces among words. I need to find a way to find this string pattern in a long string.
For example
TxT='f 2000 min';
TxT='f2000min';
TxT='f 2000 min';
At first, I came up with this,
regexp(Txt,'(f \d+ min)||(of\d+min)','match')
but it doesn't work for the last case for the number of spaces. Is there any way to not consider spaces into regular expressions or that a variable number of spaces inside the string might be in the strings?
2 Comments
Guillaume
on 3 May 2016
Note that OR in regular expressions is a single bar |, your regular expression would theoretically match an empty string (it doesn't because the regular expression engine never matches empty)
See Stephen's answer for the solution. Do not use | when you only need to change the number of times a character needs to be match. It will usually be slower than just using quantifiers (*, ?, +, {m, n}, {m,}, or {n})
Accepted Answer
Stephen23
on 3 May 2016
Edited: Stephen23
on 21 Apr 2021
You were almost there:
>> fmt = 'f *\d+ *min';
>> regexp('f 2000 min',fmt,'match')
ans =
f 2000 min
>> regexp('f2000min',fmt,'match')
ans =
f2000min
>> regexp('f 2000 min',fmt,'match')
ans =
f 2000 min
One of the best things about MATLAB is the great documentation. It means that you don't have to guess how MATLAB works, or ask random strangers on internet forums. The documentation is online, and searchable using your favorite internet search engine. And when I searched for ˇMATLAB regular expression", this is the first result:
It explains how to specify how many times characters or patterns should be matched.
2 Comments
More Answers (0)
See Also
Categories
Find more on Logical in Help Center and File Exchange
Products
Community Treasure Hunt
Find the treasures in MATLAB Central and discover how the community can help you!
Start Hunting!