Question: I need to capture customer names that have a slash, comma, and asterisk in the line.
Example:
Originator:/Account:*******1000,Payor’s Business,100 Main St,The above example has a forwardslash that must be included in the capture value, but a forward slash is a regex special character.
Answer: Regular expressions assign functionality to the following characters:
[\^$.|?*+()/When applying regex to a string field that includes one of these characters in its value, you must escape the special functionality regex engines assign to the character by preceding it with a backslash (\). Regex engines interpret a backslash before any special character as its literal.
Most regex engines interpret a forward slash as the beginning or end of a regular expression.
Example:
Originator: [A-Z- *\/]{0,20}[0-9,]{0,20}([A-Z ]{0,30})This part of the expression:
[A-Z- *\/]catches any capital letter followed by a hyphen and a space followed by any character including the forward slash. Notice the backslash before the forward slash escapes the special character regex functionality as interpreted by a regex engine. The rest of the expression defines the parameters for the series of numbers to follow.
- For more information about how to use regex in integrator.io, see Regular expressions (regex).
- Here’s a tutorial on regex.