Hi all, I have encountered an unexpected challenge constructing a regex for a pattern I am looking for. I am looking for numbers in parentheses. For example, in the following string:
"On February 13, 1968, Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent a message to Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban calling upon Israel to endorse openly Resolution 242, and on May 13 President Johnson sent a letter to United Arab Republic (UAR) President Gamal Abdel Nasser, urging him to seize the unique opportunity offered by the Jarring mission to achieve peace. (79, 171)" ... I would like to match "79" and "171" (but not "UAR" or "13" or "1968"). I have been trying to construct a regex for use with analyze-string to capture this pattern, but I have not been successful. I have tried the following: analyze-string($string, "(?:\()(?:(\d+)(?:, )?)+(?:\))") In other words, there are these 3 components: 1. (?:\() a non-capturing group consisting of an open parens, followed by 2. (?:(\d+)(?:, )?)+ one or more non-capturing groups consisting of (a number followed by an optional, non-matching comma-and-space), followed by 3. (?:\)) a non-capturing group consisting of a close parens I was expecting to get the following output: <fn:analyze-string-result xmlns:fn="http://www.w3.org/2005/xpath-functions "> <fn:non-match>On February 13, 1968, Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent a message to Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban calling upon Israel to endorse openly Resolution 242, and on May 13 President Johnson sent a letter to United Arab Republic (UAR) President Gamal Abdel Nasser, urging him to seize the unique opportunity offered by the Jarring mission to achieve peace. </fn:non-match> <fn:match>(<fn:group nr="1">79</fn:group>, <fn:group nr="1">171</fn:group>)</fn:match> </fn:analyze-string-result> However, the actual result is that the first number ("79") is skipped, and only the 2nd number ("171") is captured: <fn:analyze-string-result xmlns:fn="http://www.w3.org/2005/xpath-functions "> <fn:non-match>On February 13, 1968, Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent a message to Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban calling upon Israel to endorse openly Resolution 242, and on May 13 President Johnson sent a letter to United Arab Republic (UAR) President Gamal Abdel Nasser, urging him to seize the unique opportunity offered by the Jarring mission to achieve peace. </fn:non-match> <fn:match>(79, <fn:group nr="1">171</fn:group>)</fn:match> </fn:analyze-string-result> What am I missing? Can anyone suggest a regex that is able to capture both numbers inside the parentheses? Or do I need to make a two-pass run through this, finding parenthetical text with a first analyze-string like "\(.+\)" and then looking inside its matches with a second analyze-string like "(\d+)(?:, )?"? Thanks, Joe
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