Need Help With On Regex Expression

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Garibaldi - 25 Mar 2004 20:09 GMT

Folks,

I have a very large text file to parse and I'm thinking
of using a regex.

I need to isolate data bounded by "200~" (200tilde).
The "200~" appears at the start of a line. There can be
one or more lines between each "200~".

This regex, ^(200~), gets the "200~"'s only. I need to
get what's in between. The following is a sample of the
text file in question.

200~012~020000654518~0503012002~0603312002~07DANIEL R
PEOPLES~082773 SMARTYPANTS DRIVE~09MYTOWN NV
89052~12HENDERSON~13NV~1489052~
1910~24blahblah@abc.com~251`
400~0103012002~0200~03REGULAR SAVINGS~04Balance
Forward~051170~071~0810`
200~300~01KATHLEEN C TOOTLES~021`

Any help would be appreciated

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Peter J. Veger - 25 Mar 2004 22:33 GMT

Maybe this works:

(?ms)^200~(.*?)(?=^2~00~)

(?ms) sets multiline option ('^' matches the beginning of a line) and
singleline option ('. ' also matches a newline)
^200~ matches 200~ at the begin of a line
(.*?) matches and captures everything that comes thereafter (a greedy
capturing group)
(?=^200~) until there is another 200~ at the begin of the line (a zero-width
positive lookahead)

I have not tested this but I hope that it gives at least some pointers..

Peter Veger, Best

> Folks,
>
[quoted text clipped - 18 lines]
>
> Any help would be appreciated

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Garibaldi - 26 Mar 2004 00:59 GMT

With one change your expression works perfectly. Here's
the working expression:

(?ms)^200~(.*?)(?=^200~)

Thanks very much, Peter.

>-----Original Message-----
>Maybe this works:
[quoted text clipped - 37 lines]
>
>.

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Peter J. Veger - 26 Mar 2004 09:37 GMT

Sorry for the typo (it was just before going to bed...)

Sorry also for the wrong name: (.*?) is not 'greedy' but 'lazy'

and I should read my solution as:
find the marker at bol and capture just enough characters to see the next
marker at bol

Peter J. Veger

> With one change your expression works perfectly. Here's
> the working expression:
[quoted text clipped - 50 lines]
> >
> >.

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Need Help With On Regex Expression

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