CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#regex
user610217
user610217

Reputation:

Regex to extract column definitions from a SQL Query

Consider the following queries:

select
    foo,
    bar,
    yourmom
from
    theTable

select top 10 *
from
    theTable

select distinct foo, bar + 1, yourmom from theTable

I want a regex query that would extract:

foo,
bar,
yourmom

*

foo, bar + 1, yourmom

respectively.

I tried ^\sselect\s(distinct\s)?(top\s\d*)?(?'columns'.*\s)from[\s.]*$, which I thought would work, but doesn't. I've been playing with it for a while now and I still cannot get it to work in all three test cases. Can someone help me with their regex-fu?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2550

Answers (2)

barsju
barsju

Reputation: 4446

Edit: First you need to make .-match every character including newline. In java you can set the DOTALL flag, but in C# I believe you should use the RegexOptions.SingleLine option.

Then this expression should work:

^\s*select\s+(?:distinct\s+)?(?:top\s+\d*\s+)?(?'columns'.*?)from.*$

Upvotes: 3

Paolo Tedesco
Paolo Tedesco

Reputation: 57202

I think that it would actually be easier to write a "proper" parser for SQL queries (check Irony: it's awesome and comes with a SQL example) than using regular expressions.

Upvotes: 1

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