Please provide me with a regular expression

Please help me find a regular expression to parse the data like this:

'EBB112'  '0 23923 12272 7'    Carrots            'C' 'O' 'A' 'B' 'C'  '12/128ml'     '$9.65'       '$0.80'

'EBB211'  '0 23923 12266 6'   'Vegetables & Turkey'    'C' 'O' 'A' 'B' 'C'     '12/128m开发者_JAVA百科l'     '$9.65'       '$0.80'

I have these 11 fields (shown in single quotes) and I need to parse them field by field and save them into a .csv file.Have about more then 3000 such lines.

Any help would be highly appreciated. Thanks

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I would recommend not trying to figure out a regex yourself - try to use an appropriate library to handle stuff like that.

Take a good look at FileHelpers - it's a great, free C# library to handle any kind of delimited (e.g. CSV, tab-delimited) or fixed-width import files.

You basically define the structure of your import file in a class that represents the data (something like this: I don't know what your field are called - so I'm just guessing :-)

using System;
using FileHelpers;

namespace ReadDataFromFile
{
    [DelimitedRecord(" ")] 
    public class DataClass
    {
        [FieldQuoted('\'', QuoteMode.OptionalForBoth)]
        public string EbbField;
        [FieldQuoted('\'', QuoteMode.OptionalForBoth)]
        public string CompoundField;
        [FieldQuoted('\'', QuoteMode.OptionalForBoth)]
        public string VegiField;
        [FieldQuoted('\'', QuoteMode.OptionalForBoth)]
        public string C1Field;
        [FieldQuoted('\'', QuoteMode.OptionalForBoth)]
        public string O1Field;
        [FieldQuoted('\'', QuoteMode.OptionalForBoth)]
        public string A1Field;
        [FieldQuoted('\'', QuoteMode.OptionalForBoth)]
        public string B1Field;
        [FieldQuoted('\'', QuoteMode.OptionalForBoth)]
        public string C2Field;
        [FieldQuoted('\'', QuoteMode.OptionalForBoth)]
        public string MlField;
        [FieldQuoted('\'', QuoteMode.OptionalForBoth)]
        public string DollarField1;
        [FieldQuoted('\'', QuoteMode.OptionalForBoth)]
        public string DollarField2;
    }
}

and then the FileHelpers library handles all the rest for you:

using FileHelpers;

...
  FileHelperEngine engine = new FileHelperEngine(typeof(DataClass)); 
  DataClass[] res = engine.ReadFile(@"D:\test.data") as DataClass[]; 

Now, your array res contains one entry for each line in your data file - pretty slick!

No fuss, no muss, no regexes.

---

Use text2re, a free web-based "regex by example" generator. This will help you varieties of regular expression to test.

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You can split the string instead by ' '.

var array = Regex.Split(line.Substring(1, line.Length - 2), "' '");

I've removed the first and the last chars because they will not be removed by the split method.

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Start with this

system.text.regularexpressions.regex.matches(Str,@""\'(.*?)\'"))

That will grab all the stuff between single quotes but you need to look at each match and this won't handle weird cases with nested delimiters or other such nonsense.

---

('?.'?)\s('?.'?)\s('?.'?)\s('?.'?)\s('?.'?)\s('?.'?)\s('?.'?)\s('?.'?)\s('?.'?)\s('?.'?)\s('?.*'?)

I think basicly ('?.'?) means a group of characters that might start with ' and end with ' and then any number of \s or simply speaking whitespaces

I might be wrong thou

---

Try this(this won't handle single quotes within data):

string[] entries = 
    { 
        "'EBB112'        '0 23923 12272 7'    'Carrots'            'C' 'O' 'A' 'B' 'C'     '12/128ml'     '$9.65'       '$0.80'",
        "'EBB211'  '0 23923 12266 6'   'Vegetables & Turkey'    'C' 'O' 'A' 'B' 'C'     '12/128ml'     '$9.65'       '$0.80' "
    };

    var newEntries = entries.Select(a=> Regex.Replace(a, "'\\s+'", "','")).ToList();

    newEntries.ForEach(
        a=> <YOUR_FILE_STREAM>.WriteLine(a)
    );

---

you don't need regex for that as far as i can see ...

split into lines ... strip the first, and the last single quote, and split by this string "' '"

//edit:

ah... those whitspaces weren't there some time ago ;-)

the line with "Carrots" (the field without single quotes) makes this a bit painfull

lets try this regex as a split token on all lines:

/'\W+'/

ignore empty fields in the results, and mark all lines that don't produce 11 non-empty fields for further processing ... you will need another regex for those ...