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SOLVED

Regex parse string that may contain optional characters

ansonwun
8 - Asteroid

Hi. I am trying to use the RegEx Tool to parse the following source data:

 

Doe, J
Smith, K::abc123::500
Chan, L::abc567::500

 

The pattern of data is that 1) it may contain the substring "::abcXXX::500", 2) if it does, only the "XXX" part will vary from one record to another. And I'd like to parse the data into 2 columns like this:

Doe, J 
Smith, Kabc123
Chan, Labc567

 

I used this expression in the RegEx Tool
(.*?)\:\:(\w*)\:\:

 

and was able to correctly parse the last 2 records. But for the first record, it's giving Nulls for both columns. How should I modify the expression to make that substring "optional"?

 

Thanks in advance!

1 REPLY 1
BenMoss
ACE Emeritus
ACE Emeritus

Perhaps the simplest way would be to replace instances of :: with a single delimiter such as | and then use the text-to-columns tool to do a split, using this new delimiter, to three columns, this will give us a name column for every line, a second column for lines with the additional suffix which would be your abc123 or abc567 and then a final column '500' which you can simply remove.

 

Check out my solution attached.

 

Ben

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