StringTheory RegEx help finding Date in Text

[vitesse]

Hi Jane

there are lots of different versions of regex and Clarion’s implementation (used in both StrPos and Match) is a bit idiosyncratic and limited compared to many others.

so if you look in the Clarion help for strPos, or at

strpos_return_matching_value_position_.htm [Clarion Community Help]

you will see what the valid options are - and you can see your syntax is not supported.

a while ago there was a discussion about quantifiers like your {1,2} and I wrote a function to expand them to valid Clarion syntax. see:

Issue with {n} Quantifiers in Clarion’s MATCH Function

Hi Mark and Carl over on the newsgroups back in March last year, Alberto asked about this and I knocked up a function for him to expand the regex so it worked in Clarion. I released it under the MIT license so it is unencumbered. ho ho ho - here’s a Christmas present and no need for any Clarion tax! hth and Merry Christmas! Geoff R prototype is: ExpandRegEx PROCEDURE(string pRegex),string and the code is: ExpandRegEx PROCEDURE (string pRegex) !-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-…

but in your case your might just write [0-9][0-9]? to indicate one or two digits.

so your first might be something like

‘[0-9][0-9]?/[0-9][0-9]?/[0-9][0-9][0-9]?[0-9]?’

or

ExpandRegex(‘[0-9]{1:2}/[0-9]{1:2}/[0-9]{2:4}’)

I am not sure about your second regex with the month names - maybe you need something like

January|Jan|February|Feb|… and so on

Others may know Clarion’s regex better than me but TBH it might be easier to just write straight code - and in that vein I would be interested to see what Claude wrote for you.

cheers

Geoff R