Python regex: find lines where period is missing in

Question

I'm looking for a regular expression, implemented in Python, that will match on this text

WHERE PolicyGUID = '531B2310-403A-13DA-5964-E2EFA56B0753'

but will not match on this text

WHERE AsPolicy.PolicyGUID = '531B2310-403A-13DA-5964-E2EFA56B0753'

I'm doing this to find places in a large piece of SQL where the developer did not explicitly reference the table name. All I want to do is print the offending lines (the first WHERE clause above). I have all of the code done except for the regex.

What have you tried? `WHERE PolicyGUID = '531B2310-403A-13DA-5964-E2EFA56B0753'` would do it. — nmichaels, Aug 04 '11 at 16:15
Why not just use [the in operator](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3437059/does-python-have-a-string-contains-method)? — Michael Todd, Aug 04 '11 at 16:17
The lines will be in a similar format but will not all be related to PolicyGuid. They will be in the form of a WHERE clause where the term before the equals sign does not contain the reference to a table. So, it will not contain a period. — Mike, Aug 04 '11 at 16:19

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 04 '11 at 16:18

2

re.compile('''WHERE [^.]+ =''')

Here, the [] indicates "match a set of characters," the ^ means "not" and the dot is a literal period. The + means "one or more."

Was that what you were looking for?

answered Aug 04 '11 at 16:18

Eli Stevens

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 04 '11 at 16:18

0

something like

WHERE .*\..* = .*

not sure how accurate can be, it depends on how your data looks... If you provide a bigger sample it can be refined

answered Aug 04 '11 at 16:18

ksn

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 04 '11 at 16:18

0

Something like this would work in java, c#, javascript, I suppose you can adapt it to python:

/WHERE +[^\.]+ *\=/

answered Aug 04 '11 at 16:18

scrat.squirrel

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 04 '11 at 16:19

>>> l
["WHERE PolicyGUID = '531B2310-403A-13DA-5964-E2EFA56B0753' ", "WHERE AsPolicy.P
olicyGUID = '531B2310-403A-13DA-5964-E2EFA56B0753' "]
>>> [line for line in l if re.match('WHERE [^.]+ =', line)]
["WHERE PolicyGUID = '531B2310-403A-13DA-5964-E2EFA56B0753' "]

Python regex: find lines where period is missing in

4 Answers4