this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2026
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Expressions (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 weeks ago by cannedtuna@lemmy.world to c/memes@lemmy.world
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[–] BiscuityCat@lemmy.world 13 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

I never understood why are people scared of regular expressions. I love them and they can be quite usefull.

Here is an example of one regex I wrote recently - it is used in replace:

(?:^-\[[^[]+\]$| ?\[.+?\] ?)
[–] Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Must be ironu

[–] heartSagan5@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I could use a use case. RegEx are pretty "what does it mean" without what it's targeted on.

[–] BiscuityCat@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

I have mentioned it in the comments below, but to explain it simply, I just wanted to remove all the bracketed text + a dash if there is no other text.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

that feels overcomplicated. you're always matching on square brackets anyway, so why make it a conditional? and one case not allowing spaces seems inconsistent...

[–] BiscuityCat@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

It may feel like it, but I needed to handle all the edge cases. But if you think it can be simplified, I'm willing to learn.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

without knowing the format of the input data or what flags you're using it's obviously a bit harder to reason about, but since you're doing a replace i assume you don't care about the content of the bracketed text, you just want to remove it. the way i'm reading yours is

(?: # don't store this group
  # either
    ^  # start of line
    -\[[^[]+\]  # a -, a [ followed by at least one non-[, then a ] (passing one is fine)
    $  # end of line 
 | # or
  ?  # maybe one space
 \[.+?\]  # a [ followed by at least one character, then a ] (don't pass any)
  ? # maybe one space
)

since the two branches are almost identical, you can probably compact it into -?\s*\[.+?\]\s*. maybe a dash, then maybe some space, then angle brackets around something, then maybe more space.

[–] BiscuityCat@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

You are right. It is just removal of the bracketed text. The input is multi-line string, so only flag used was the multi-line mode.

These are string lines I have encountered and how I wanted to change them:

1. "[...]"               -> ""
2. "-[...]"              -> ""
3. "-[...] text"         -> "-text"
4. "-text [...]"         -> "-text"
5. "[...] text [...]"    -> "text"
6. "-[...] text [...]"   -> "-text"

The main point is that I needed to remove the dash only if there is no other text on the line.

I have tried the regex you are suggesting at the beginning, but it failed at points (3) and (6).

EDIT: It just occurred to me that the first line of my comment sounds like stupid AI. 🤦

[–] lime@feddit.nu 1 points 3 weeks ago

aaah i see. then a conditional makes sense if you need to one-shot it. personally i would have run it through twice but i know there are systems that don't allow that.

[–] Funkt4st1c@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

I started using regex because i need to rename a lot of my pirated media from "this_episode_uploaded_byXxXSuperEl33tSqwaaadXxX_MLP_s04_Episode7_bats.mkv"

and linux deals with it very nicely. Much better than manual, anyways