Download - The Bastards Book of Regular Expressions

Matching any letter, any number 651200 block of Houston St.400 block of W. Abbey Ave.00 block of S. 8th StreetAnswerWe basically want to “zero out” the least significant digits of an address. On a street where theaddress numbers are three or four digits, zeroing out the last two digits generally provides enoughvagueness.We can use \d to match any numerical digit and curly braces to target 1 to 2 digits. We also needto use a right-side word boundary so that the rightmost digits are matched:Find \d{1,2}\bReplace 00 block ofNote: There are competing public interests to consider here: we want to mask the exact address ofthe incident. However, we also don’t want to redact the address to the point that its geographicalcharacteristic is rendered meaningless or paints a misleading characteristic.For instance, if we changed the range of the curly braces like so:Find \d{1,3}Replace 000 block ofThen the following addresses:1520 Broadway, New York, NY1001 Broadway, New York, NY1999 Broadway, New York, NYAre effectively mapped to:1000 block of Broadway, New York, NY1000 block of Broadway, New York, NY1000 block of Broadway, New York, NYIn New York, TK map image