I now this can be done using Linux GREP but I am new to regular expressions and its options.
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you
Jason.
(Moderator: This is a user request that went un-noticed because it languished on another thread that had already been marked as an answer. This reply is now its own unique thead being split from its original and moved to the Regular Expression Forum.)
The trick is to place the items into matching groups ( ) and non-matching groups (?: ) or stuff you want and stuff to ignore. I have chosen to use named groups and created a regex to place all the data items into named groups such as FirstName, LastName and City to name a few. To do that I use this construct (?<GroupNameHere> MatchPatternHere )
That will allows me to access the data in a regex match such as m.Group["City"].value to retrieve an actual value. Now the pattern I have used throughout is to say [^,]* which means, loosely, match everything that is not in this box [ ]. So we will match til it hits a comma. That is the secret to regexes find a pattern to match upon. Here it is in code, notice in the regex we define the group we want followed by what we don't want.
string address = @"Mr. Joe Blow
ABCD Ltd, Main Street, Suite 108, Chicago, 80112,
Good Customer, Tel: 707 5556708, Fax: 707 5556709
";
// String concatenated only for forum post...do not do in real code. string pattern = @"(?<Salutation>[^\s]*)(?:\s+)" + @"(?<FirstName>[^\s]*)(?:\s+)" + @"(?<LastName>[^\s]*)(?:[\s\r\n]*)" + @"(?<Company>[^,]*)(?:,\s?)" + @"(?<Street>[^,]*)(?:,\s?)" + @"(?<Suite>[^,]*)(?:,\s?)" + @"(?<City>[^,]*)(?:,\s?)" + @"(?<Zip>[^,]*)(?:[,\s\r\n]*)" + @"(?<Notes>[^,]*)(?:,\s?Tel:\s)" + @"(?<Phone>[^,]*)(?:,\s?Fax:\s)" + @"(?<Fax>[^,]*)";
if (m.Success) foreach (string name in groupNames) Console.WriteLine("{0,10} : {1}", name, m.Groups[name]);
What that shows is the match groups. If you notice there is a "0" match group which we did not specify. This is the whole match which is found. We don't need it for this example, so it will be ignored and we can extract just what we want such as Zip or Notes.
