CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rregex
Robert Cline
Robert Cline

Reputation: 37

Regex Question: separate string at the last comma in string

My string pattern is as follows:

1233 fox street, omaha NE ,69131-7233
Jeffrey Jones, 666 Church Street, Omaha NE ,69131-72339
Betty Davis, LLC, 334 Aloha Blvd., Fort Collins CO ,84444-00333
,1233 Decker street, omaha NE ,69131-7233

I need to separate the above string into four variables: name, address, city_state, zipcode.

Since the pattern has three to four commas, I am starting at the right to separate the field into multiple fields.

rubular.com says the pattern ("(,\\d.........)$"))) or the pattern ",\d.........$" will match the zipcode at the end of the string.

regex101.com, finds neither of the above patterns comes up with a match.

When I try to separate with:

#need to load pkg:tidyr for the `separate`

function library(tidyr) separate(street_add, c("street_add2", "zip", sep= ("(,\d.........)$")))

or with:

separate(street_add, c("street_add2", "zip", sep=  (",\d.........$")))

In both scenarios, R splits at the first comma in the string.
How do I split the string into segments?
Thank you.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 291

Answers (1)

Ryszard Czech
Ryszard Czech

Reputation: 18641

Use

sep=",(?=[^,]*$)"

See regex proof.

EXPLANATION

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  ,                        ','
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  (?=                      look ahead to see if there is:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    [^,]*                    any character except: ',' (0 or more
                             times (matching the most amount
                             possible))
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    $                        before an optional \n, and the end of
                             the string
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  )                        end of look-ahead

Upvotes: 2

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