RegEx Examples - 12 Handy Use Cases

[brianprestidge]

A lot of data prep questions I get asked about seem to come back to the same answer - "Use Regex!"

However, RegEx isn't exactly easy to understand for someone who has never come across it before.

This is how I started out, but by dissecting other peoples' uses of RegEx, I started to understand how RegEx works and now I seem to use it in pretty much every workflow I create (slight exaggeration).

So I decided to upload the attached workflow that has 12 use cases for RegEx for you to use, adapt, learn from and improve on. Please download the attached Alteryx workflow and explore what's going on and you'll soon be more than comfortable with RegEx too!

I've also put some useful RegEx links on the original blog for this workflow here: http://www.theinformationlab.co.uk/2016/10/27/regex-practice-using-alteryx/

Feel free to upload your use cases for RegEx on this discussion post, along with examples, and perhaps we can start to create a small repository for everyone - from RegEx newbies to those highly skilled in this complex but extremely useful tool.

[TaraM]

Thanks for sharing @brianprestidge! Love me some regex.

[alex]

Thanks for sharing!  This beats my RegEx cheat sheet.  Being a total novice to RegEx, this type of workflow example is a great help.  I loved to see if you come up with any other common scenarios that aren't covered in the samples.

[Anitta]

Hi Brian

Thank for the regex examples. I have a question for you regarding regexmatch. If i have two columns  A and B containing  some of the sane type of data. A is the data than i want to be matched exactly whereas B can contain redundant data.I want to be able to match and parse out the total numbe of exact matches between the two column using regex. do you have an idea to how to do that?

br anitta 

[brianprestidge]

Hi Anitta

Do you have some sample data you could post up - or if not mock something up that is similar to your example?

Thanks

Brian

[brianprestidge]

5 more useful RegEx examples attached based upon common data problems that arise

[Manjari]

Hi @brianprestidge, 

Requesting your help on a formula that replaces any string with "1" 

formula giving me an error 

REGEX_Replace([_CurrentField_],($) ,'1')

[MarqueeCrew]

How about:

IIF(IsNull([Field]),Null(),"1")

Keeps null and turns all strings to "1".

Cheers,

Mark

[Manjari]

@MarqueeCrew

Hi Mark,

Thanks a ton, this worked like a charm :)

[priyanka31]

Hi,

Thank you so much for the real examples. Can you help me to PARSE my FileName column- 

\\ABC-WIN-NAS-P21.ABC.com\GOT_FS\Log_Cost\Contingency\Outputs\COGNOS\COGNOS_Unit_DC.csv

I need only COGNOS_Unit_DC from the Filename column