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REGEX Capture Groups via Script - Javascript or Python

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Posted on by MisterH

Hi Everyone,

I need to run a REGEX through a large text file (very badly formatted CSV with oodles of issues in parsing) and return the results to PAD. The only way I can see to achieve this is via either JS or Python script. I am currently working with a JS implementation using the following:

Set Variable called %REGEX% = ^(?<SKU>[\\d\\w]+),\\d*,\"?(?<Description>.+)\"?,\\$(?<Price>[\\d\\.]+)

Read Text from File into %FileContents%

Run Javascript&colon;

var csv = %FileContents%;
var reg = %RegEx%;
var out = csv.matchAll(reg);
WScript.Echo(out);

This does not work 😞

I receive the error (truncated) --> Microsoft JScript compilation error: Expected ';'

Can anyone point me in the right direction to solving this? I'm guessing that it is something syntactic with the REGEX itself but I am not sure how to debug this particular scenario.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Cheers

MisterH

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Power Automate Desktop

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MisterH 51 on at

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PS - The REGEX pattern works perfectly for it's intended task (created and tested in REGEX Buddy)

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VJR 7,635 on at

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In javascript every line should end with a semicolon ;

So correct that and if still facing issues then post the original script here to check for errors.

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VJR 7,635 on at

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I think after re-reading now I understood your above code better.

The first three lines are your PAD actions and the rest is your Javascript code? Is it?

Also check out "Parse Text" which has an option to turn on regex and generate the output.

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MisterH 51 on at

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Hi VJR,

Yes, first three lines are the steps in PAD.
1/ Set a variable to hold the REGEX pattern
2/ Read the text 'raw' from the file
3/ Run the JavaScript step below

The remaining lines are the JS itself, with %FileContents% and %RegEx% as the PAD variables holding their respective data, and being passed from PAD to the JS step.
var csv = %FileContents%; var reg = %RegEx%; var out = csv.matchAll(reg); WScript.Echo(out);

Sorry for the lack of clarity previously. I hope this explains things a little better.

MisterH

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VJR 7,635 on at

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No issues, have you checked out the Parse Text action I have mentioned above. It has an in-built option where you can pass the regex and get the output.

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MisterH 51 on at

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PS (again) - the Parse Text step is going to be very inefficient for processing the data. Each one of these files has more than 16k lines, and there are going to be a continuous stream of them all poorly formatted due to the process that produces them - beyond my control I'm afraid. The number of data points I need to extract per line is 3 (as you can see from the capture groups in the REGEX), however handling this in a single step would be a vast improvement and in theory should be possible with either JS or Python from what I can tell. I'm just not sure how to correctly pass in the data for it to work.

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VJR 7,635 on at

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I read this message in your original post but could not co-relate it with the code written in JS.

Didn't co-relate the second time too. Its not about your explanation but about me :).

I think below is the same equivalent of what you are trying to achieve via the javascript code.

When you disable the "First occurrence only", the matches variable will return multiple matches.

Post back if it much more complicated.

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MisterH 51 on at

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Here is a sample data set with some of the 'cleaner' data that is available in one of the files:

ACEFOBKIT,,"CS ACE WIEGAND 1 DOOR KIT, INC CS4890 CONTROLLER, HID READER & 10 X SEOS FOBS",$123.00,1 Door Kits,CST, ACEFOBKITSTART,458922514,"CS ACE WIEGAND 1 DOOR KIT, INC CS4890 CONTROLLER, PROG KEYPAD HID READER & 10 X SEOS FOBS",$123.00,1 Door Kits,CST, CS4836,,CS iKEY 1 DOOR KIT 4836 with 10 iKEYS,$123.00,1 Door Kits,CST, CS4828,,CS iKEY 2 DOOR KIT 4828 with 10 iKEYS,$123.00,2 & 4 Door Kits,CST,

and yes, there is a comma(,) at the end of every line.

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VJR 7,635 on at

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As a side note to my above screenshot on Parse Text, to access PAD variables in a script enclose quotes around it

var csv = "%FileContents%";

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MisterH 51 on at

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Parse Text can do multi-match, but it doesn't seem to handle multiple capture groups and simply returns the string (entire length) between where the match starts and finishes. I need to specifically extract the capture groups, which would mean running Parse Text 3 times per line of text. This means on a 16K line file there are 48k steps inside of a for each loop, giving a total of 80k steps in total. Horrifically inefficient.

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