Replacing character groups
What's the best way to replace character groups?
I want not to remove character groups as $zstrip does but to replace them with whitespaces.
$translate needs explicit character list.
Effectively I want to remove any characters besides letters, numbers and a small (known) subset of punctuation characters, replacing everything else with whitespaces.
A little bit $translate(), a little bit of $zstrip() and the job is done (in the example below, I want to keep parenthesis)
set str="abcd(123)/,op(56)*&^%$987ABC" write $tr(str,$zstrip(str,"*AN","()"),$j("",$l(str))) what to keep generell ------^^^ what to keep extra --------------^^By the way, he above works for unicode chars too, unless your pattern match table is outdated ;-))
Another solution is to use an loop and RegEx:
set str="abcd(123)/,op(56)*&^%$987ABC", i=0 set remove="[:punct:]|[:symbol:]" set keep = "()" while $locate(str,remove,i,i,c) { set:keep'[c $e(str,i-1)=" " }I've been thinking about it but I think there are more letter characters. Unicode is a big place.
Hi Ed!
This is $Translate again )
Assume you need all the ASCII codes from 33 to 126 - letters, numbers, punctuation.
So:
classmethod onlygood(str) as %String { for i=0:1:255 set $E(all,i)=$C(i) for i=33:1:126 set $E(good,i)=$C(i) // adding spaces for "no good" symbols set good=$J("",34)_good_$J("",129) return $tr(str,all,good) }a solution with NO $TRANSLATE
set str="aN d.ef123$eR=xx?,yWz"for i=1:1:$l(str) s:$e(str,i)'?1(1AN,1".",1" ",1",") $e(str,i)=" "
aN d.ef123 eR xx ,yWzRegexp?
USER> Set str = "abcd(123)/,op(56)*&^%$987ABC" USER> Write ##class(%Regex.Matcher).%New("[^\w\d()]", str).ReplaceAll(" ") abcd(123) op(56) 987ABC USER> Write ##class(%Regex.Matcher).%New("[^\w\d()]+", str).ReplaceAll(" ") abcd(123) op(56) 987ABC