CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regex
Rochelle Sides
Rochelle Sides

Reputation: 1

And operator in REGEX

I am trying to find two separate groups of text within a document using REGEX in an application. Example: 

(facility services|MAFS|MFA|facility|facilities)
(agreement|lease)

I only want to identify documents that have a match to one word in both sets of text, such as facility and agreement. How would I write that in REGEX?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 210

Answers (2)

user557597
user557597

Reputation:

This is commonly known as Out-Of-Order matching.

If you get into a situation where you have more than 2 sets, then the only
efficient way to do it is with an engine that does conditional constructs.

But, this is it for your 2 sets (?:.*?\b(?:(?(1)(?!))(facility|MAFS|MFA|facilities)|(?(2)(?!))(agreement|lease))\b){2}

Readable version 

 (?:
      .*? 
      \b          
      (?:
           (?(1)
                (?!)
           )
           (                        # (1 start)
                facility
             |  MAFS
             |  MFA
             |  facilities
           )                        # (1 end)
        |  
           (?(2)
                (?!)
           )
           ( agreement | lease )    # (2)
      )
      \b 
 ){2}

Upvotes: 0

Barmar
Barmar

Reputation: 782166

If you're just looking for two matches, just search for both of them in either order using alternation.

((MAFS|MFA|facility|facilities)[\s\S]*(agreement|lease))|((agreement|lease)[\s\S]*(MAFS|MFA|facility|facilities))

If there are more patterns this doesn't scale well because of combinatorial explosion, so lookaheads are the solution. See Regular Expressions: Is there an AND operator?

Upvotes: 1

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