[wplug] Regex help?

[Michael Skowvron]

Try this:

"^([0-9]\.){1,4} "


^ - match at the beginning of the line

( - a pattern that is

[0-9] - a number followed by a

\. - period

) - end this pattern

{ - specify that this pattern may repeat

1 - 1 to

4 - times

}

" " and then a space after the last period



Michael

On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 3:01 PM, Doug Green <diego96 at mac.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> I've got some work data that I'm trying to clean up. It's a single column
> of Excel data, each row contains a chapter/section/subsection/paragraph
> number followed by a string of text. I'd like to separate the heading
> numbers into a different column than the body of the text (creating a two
> column data set).
>
> My plan was to do a CSV export, then add a comma after the number. By
> re-importing the CSV this <should> put the section number in a different
> column than the text. Example:
>
> 7.1.3.2. Section describing general attributes of an item.
>
> Converted to:
>
> 7.1.3.2., Section describing...
>
> Emacs has a convenient replace-regex function that simply asks first what
> regex you want to search for and next what you want to replace it with.
> I've tried every combo of "[0-9]\." and "[:digit:]\." but I'm not matching
> ANY results. Can anyone point me in the right direction for a little help
> on writing a generalized regex that will match "any number followed by a
> period, optionally followed by up to 3 more numbers each followed by
> periods"? Clear as mud, right?
>
> Thanks!
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