How to parse sentences

Question

Hello community,

I would like to parse the inputs in a column by using Regex tool. I only need wording that located between numbers. In this case results should be "car", "plane", "boat", "road" respectively

Orange MMM-9999 car 01.-12.22Blue-899 plane 12.2022Red LL KK-2222 boat  01.-12.22Green G WWW-3333 road 05.22

Thank you in advance

flying008 · Answer

Hi, @maksu

FYI.

(?:[[:alnum:]]\s|\-\s?|^)([a-z]+)(?=\s|$|\-\d)

TxtGetOrange MMM-9999 car 01.-12.22carBlue-899 plane 12.2022planeRed LL KK-2222 boat  01.-12.22boatGreen G WWW-3333 road 05.22roadOrange car 04.22carKKK.2222 car 06.2022carRed, Basel plane-9999 12.22planeGreen-3333 - boatboatGreen C3333 road 02.22-01.23roadGreen-green-plane 06.-08.22planeRed plane 01.-12.22planeplane-333 09.22plane

BTW, If you already know all keyword, maybe can use Find/Replace tool to match it.

CoG · Answer

To further build off of what @binu_acs - has already said. Take for example your first and last row in the most recent table you shared:

Orange MMM-9999 car 01.-12.22plane-333 09.22

If the output for row 1 is "car" and row 2 is supposed to be "plane", how is an algorithm supposed to know that you didn't want to include "Orange MMM" from row 1? It, just like row 2, is followed by a hyphen and then numbers. Pinning down the exact structure for your data will be crucial to getting the information that you need out of it.

binu_acs · Answer

@maksu regex works based on the pattern in the given data, if your data follow different patterns then it is very difficult to write a regex formula. Does your actual data follow any pattern? Also what are the expected results for the last 3 rows?