RegEx Help

SteveH · Post by **SteveH** » Thu Nov 03, 2005 2:33 pm

I am using a regular expression to remove some dates from a file. I want to make the following change:

/Title (19/04/2005DMG Document Review)

becomes...

Code: Select all

/Title (DMG Document Review)

The regular expression starts \/Title \([:digit:] but I am finding that it matches strings beginning...

Code: Select all

/Title (G

and skipping those that start with a date.

Using \/Title \([0-9] only the digts are captured.

Am I being a bit silly and [:digit:] is not numbers?

POSIX Regular Expression syntax is enabled.

ben_josephs · Post by **ben_josephs** » Thu Nov 03, 2005 2:43 pm

You need [[:digit:]], not [:digit:], which finds any of the characters: :, d, i, g, t !

BTW, you don't need to escape slashes.

SteveH · Post by **SteveH** » Thu Nov 03, 2005 3:17 pm

Thanks for that. With that pointer I just spotted the (Note the extra pairs of brackets in the help file. It now works as advertised.

I have removed the superfluous escape characters but will stick with [0-9] as it saves me 18 characters in the search string.

Cheers

(This is all to strip out dates from automatically generated PDF bookmarks. Now that it is a TP macro, it runs in seconds and saves hours of work. Good result!)