http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/essential/regex/

Code:

void setup()  
{   
  size(200, 200); 
  background(0); 
  parseData();    
} 
 
void parseData() 
{ 
  String record = "[#date: \"26-06-2008\", #start: \"14:10:52\", #history: [21: 1, 31: 6], #duration: 11]"; 
  Pattern date = Pattern.compile(".*\\\"([0-9]{2})-([0-9]{2})-(200[0-9]{1})\\\".*");
  Matcher m = date.matcher(record); 
  
  if(m.matches()) 
  { 
     println("hit!");  
     println(m.group(1)); 
  } 
} 
 

F

Thank you Florian and Ben, that was a life saver.

Ben: Sadly work has me lingering on page 157 for 2 days straight now :/
(inspiring and great book!)
I don't really need the date time values for much other than drawing a small graph in Processing, so I´ll take that hurdle when it comes up in the book :)

Florian: Thanks for the link, I had been there before but had a hard time getting the syntax to compile in Processing, but your example helped out with that part.

I implemented the rest of the values with the logic of Florians example
but here is, especially for my own amusement, a short run through I made from RTM ;)
after dissecting the example, for others having trouble.

compile(".*\\\"([0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}-200[0-9]{1})\\\".*")

" start the expression:
. any character except line breaks
* 0 or more of the previous characters in the string.
So .* means - we don't care what ever comes before in this string.

\\\ escape characters for the \ in the string, as it is in the original string:
" as it is in the original string, i.e. this is part of the string not the regex.

( start of a group, meaning: if the regex finds a match, then the part of the string incapsulated with (string here) will be stored in m.group(1);

[0-9]{2} means, any number and the {2} concatenated on the end of the expression means any number of 2 characters i size. e.g. 12 or 45, i other words 00-99.

- part of the string, not the regex.

[0-9]{2} the same as the previous.

-200[0-9]{1} means the string must contain 200x where the x is a number between 0 and 9 (the script will only go up to the year 2009, could be
written -[0-9]{4} to cover the year 0 to 9999 ... but hey, the data is all ready there and only involves 2007 and 2008.

\\\ escape characters for the \" and it ends with:

.* meaning, we don't care what ever comes after this part.


The finished script looks like this:

Quote:


Thanks again guys for the quick help !

Ricki G

Thanks Smith

That book does look quite tempting..
and I think I'll be using more time with regex' in the future. (the Boss has
all ready started throwing large data files on my desk).

How come you write that Processing tasks generally will not involve
regex usage?

Is there something I should know?
I can get to sorting my large data files with a minimum of code and in mere minutes with Processing, a task that takes hours in other languages ... and I assume that there are no speed or API issues with using Processing over C, C#, Java or actionScript?

Or did you just mean that often Processing is used for other things and I got all worried for no reason