RegEx Parsing Help

Question

Hi,

I am trying to use the RegEx tool to parse data. This is my first time using RegEx, so naturally, everything looks alien to me here. I have a dataset with a column I would like to separate into three columns; a name, a capital letter, and a number. The data currently looks like this:

Annie,F,1258

I read an introduction post to parsing with RegEx, so I get the basics, but I can't figure out why the expression I have included won't parse the way I want it to. At first, I only included an expression to parse out the name: which worked perfectly! Then, I added an expression to parse out the capital letter after the name as well, and now I am only seeing null values. See picture below. Any ideas as to how I should formulate my expression?

Ladarthure · Accepted Answer

There are 2 solutions about that, the first using text to colums (easy one) and another with regex (could be optimized I guess)

kat · Accepted Answer

Hi @mina_ran

The easiest way here is definitely text to columns, like @Ladarthure had, as you have comma separating your data points.

I thought I'd just give you a quick idea of how the regex works though, for your understanding.

* Each item in brackets is a separate bit of data to spit out - since we have three sets of brackets we get three outputs.
* \w is a letter. The + means more than 1. so you're saying give me more than one letter
* we then show that there will be a comma. This is outside the brackets as we don't want to return it
* the \u is an uppercase letter. You need to uncheck case insensitive for this to have any impact
* same thing with the comma
* the \d is a number. The plus again shows that we want more than one.
* there's loads of different ways of doing this! :)

Hope this gives you a little bit of an idea. The best place to practice regex is www.regex101.com . This will highlight your text as your going showing exactly what each part of your code is doing. I use it all the time.