CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sqlregex
starHopp3r
starHopp3r

Reputation: 79

Extracting string pattern that is not within square brackets using regex

I'm trying to extract alpha numeric characters from strings that also have some info within square brackets.

Ex:

I want the output to be:

I tried using negative look ahead, extracting patterns before'[' (works only for a few cases).

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1328

Answers (2)

Sam L
Sam L

Reputation: 313

You could try to use a Regex for this, but I think that making your own function for this would work well.

function getText(bracketedText) {
  let idx = 0
  let newIdx = 0
  let str = ''
  while (newIdx !== -1) {
    newIdx = bracketedText.indexOf('[', idx)
    if (newIdx < 0) {
      str += bracketedText.slice(idx, bracketedText.length)
    } else {
      str += bracketedText.slice(idx, newIdx)
    }
    idx = bracketedText.indexOf(']', newIdx + 1) + 1
  }
  return str
}

This should be fairly efficient at stripping out anything in brackets.

Upvotes: 0

Caius Jard
Caius Jard

Reputation: 74605

Per my comment, and after a quick look at the fine presto manual, could you:

SELECT regexp_replace('[second sentence][important] some more sample text', ' *\[.*?\] *');

Regex is any number of spaces, then sq bracket then any number of any char up to the next sq bracket, then sq bracket, then any number of spaces.

I dug the function out of the manual (no access to presto/never used), I presume by providing only two arguments it implicitly replaces matches with nothing

Upvotes: 1

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