Download - The Bastards Book of Regular Expressions

Lookarounds 114Given this list of cities and postal codes: TODO New York, NY 10006Convert it to this CSV format:TODO“Hey,” you might say, “there’s already a comma in that data.” True, but it’s just typical punctuation.If we were to open this list in Excel, we would end up with:TODO:So we need to use a simple regex to at least separate the state from the zipcode.AnswerFind (.+?), ([A-Z]{2}) (\d{5})Replace \1,\2,\3Exercise: More complex addressesBelieve it or not, the easily-fixed scenario above is one that I’ve seen keep people from makingperfectly usable, explorable data out of text.However, for most kinds of text lists, the cleanup is a little more sophisticated than one extra comma.Here’s an example in which we have to deal with street names and addresses:50 Fifth Ave. New York, NY 10012100 Ninth Ave. Brooklyn, NY 114169 Houston St. Juneau, AK 999992800 Springfield Rd. Omaha, NE 55555Change to:50,Fifth Ave.,New York,NY,10012100,Ninth Ave.,Brooklyn,NY,114169,Houston St.,Juneau,AK,999992800,Springfield Rd.,Omaha,NE,55555AnswerThis is simply breaking each part of the line into its own separate pattern:1. Street number: consecutive digits at the beginning of the line2. Street name: A combination of word characters and spaces until a literal period is reached.