regexkitlite expression - iphone

I have to replace the following in a NSURL:
a_token=lksjadfkj%2gf98273984
with
a_token=new_token
a token can be in the follwing forms:
a_token=989asaofiusaodifusa9f789asdofu&lat=43.3
a_token=lksjadfkj%2gf98273984
So it either ends with & or end line/nothing.
How could I write the regex expression for it?
Thanks!

You could try:
[stringWithURL stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfRegex:#"(?<=a_token=)[^&]*"
withString:#"new_token"];
I haven't tested it. Basically, the regex uses a look-behind assertion to match a_token=. The look-behind is not included in the text that is matched. Then, the regex matches "zero or more characters that aren't &".

Related

Oddities in fail2ban regex

This appears to be a bug in fail2ban, with different behaviour between the fail2ban-regex tool and a failregex filter
I am attempting to develop a new regex rule for fail2ban, to match:
\"%20and%20\"x\"%3D\"x
When using fail2ban-regex, this appears to produce the desired result:
^<HOST>.*GET.*\\"%20and%20\\"x\\"%3D\\"x.* 200.*$
As does this:
^<HOST>.*GET.*\\\"%20and%20\\\"x\\\"%3D\\\"x.* 200.*$
However, when I put either of these into a filter, I get the following error:
Failed during configuration: '%' must be followed by '%' or '(', found:…
To have this work in a filter you have to double-up the ‘%’, ie ‘%%’:
^<HOST>.*GET.*\\\"%%20and%%20\\\"x\\\"%%3D\\\"x.* 200.*$
While this gets the required hits running as a filter, it gets none running through fail2ban-regex.
I tried the \\\\ as Andre suggested below, but this gets no results in fail2ban-regex.
So, as this appears to be differential behaviour, I am going to file it as a bug.
According to Python's own site a singe backslash "\" has to be written as "\\\\" and there's no mention of %.
Regular expressions use the backslash character ('') to indicate
special forms or to allow special characters to be used without
invoking their special meaning. This collides with Python’s usage of
the same character for the same purpose in string literals; for
example, to match a literal backslash, one might have to write '\\'
as the pattern string, because the regular expression must be \, and
each backslash must be expressed as \ inside a regular Python string
literal
I would just go with:
failregex = (?i)^<HOST> -.*"(GET|POST|HEAD|PUT).*20and.*3d.*$
the .* wil match anything inbetween anyways and (?i) makes the entire regex case-insensitive

Not able to understand a command in perl

I need help to understand what below command is doing exactly
$abc{hier} =~ s#/tools.*/dfII/?.*##g;
and $abc{hier} contains a path "/home/test1/test2/test3"
Can someone please let me know what the above command is doing exactly. Thanks
s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/ is Perl's substitution operator. It searches a string for text that matches the regex PATTERN and replaces it with REPLACEMENT.
By default, the substitution operator works on $_. To tell it to work on a different variable, you use the binding operator - =~.
The default delimiter used by the substitution operator is a slash (/) but you can change that to any other character. This is useful if your PATTERN or your REPLACEMENT contains a slash. In this case, the programmer has used # as the delimiter.
To recap:
$abc{hier} =~ s#PATTERN#REPLACEMENT#;
means "look for text in $abc{hier} that matches PATTERN and replace it with REPLACEMENT.
The substitution operator also has various options that change its behaviour. They are added by putting letters after the final delimiter. In this case we have a g. That means "make the substitution global" - or match and change all occurrences of PATTERN.
In your case, the REPLACEMENT string is empty (we have two # characters next to each other). So we're replacing the PATTERN with nothing - effectively deleting whatever matches PATTERN.
So now we have:
$abc{hier} =~ s#PATTERN*##g;
And we know it means, "in the variable $abc{hier}, look for any string that matches PATTERN and replace it with nothing".
The last thing to look at is the PATTERN (or regular expression - "regex"). You can get the full definition of regexes in perldoc perlre. But to explain what we're using here:
/tools : is the fixed string "/tools"
.* : is zero or more of any character
/dfII : is the fixed string "/dfII"
/? : is an optional slash character
.* : is (again) zero or more of any character
So, basically, we're removing bits of a file path from a value that's stored in a hash.
This =~ means "Do a regex operation on that variable."
(Actually, as ikegami correctly reminds me, it is not necessarily only regex operations, because it could also be a transliteration.)
The operation in question is s#something#else#, which means replace the "something" with something "else".
The g at the end means "Do it for all occurences of something."
Since the "else" is empty, the replacement has the effect of deleting.
The "something" is a definition according to regex syntax, roughly it means "Starting with '/tools' and later containing '/dfII', followed pretty much by anything until the end."
Note, the regex mentions at the end /?.*. In detail, this would mean "A slash (/) , or maybe not (?), and then absolutely anything (.) any number of times including 0 times (*). Strictly speaking it is not necessary to define "slash or not", if it is followed by "anything any often", because "anything" includes as slash, and anyoften would include 0 or one time; whether it is followed by more "anything" or not. I.e. the /? could be omitted, without changing the behaviour.
(Thanks ikeagami for confirming.)
$abc{hier} =~ s#/tools.*/dfII/?.*##g;
The above commands use regular expression to strip/remove trailing /tools.*/dfII and
/tools.*/dfII/.* from value of hier member of %abc hash.
It is pretty basic perl except non standard regular expression limiters (# instead of standard /). It allows to avoid escaping / inside the regular expression (s/\/tools.*\/dfII\/?.*//g).
My personal preferred style-guide would make it s{/tools.*/dfII/?.*}{}g .

Substitution operator in Perl

I am new to perl. I have the following substitution expression:
$tmp =~ s:/x/y/z::;
I have searched a lot for it but couldn't find a similar expression.
What does it mean?
You can use non-whitespace any character as a delimiter; here, instead of the most common / (s/foo/bar/), the delimiter is : (s:foo:bar:), because what you are substituting has slash characters and if you used a slash delimiter, you'd have to escape them (s/\/x\/y\/z//) which many people consider ugly.
So your expression is simply removing the first /x/y/z from $tmp.
That means: replace /x/y/z with nothing.
For exmaple: If you have a strng like /a/b/x/y/z the result will be /a/b

Why doesn't '*' work as a perl regexp in my .Rbuildignore file?

When I try to build a package with the following in my .Rbuildignore file,
*pdf
*Rdata
I get the errors:
Warning in readLines(ignore_file) :
incomplete final line found on '/home/user/project/.Rbuildignore'
and
invalid regular expression '*pdf'
I thought '*' was a wildcard for one or more characters?
There are two styles of pattern matching for files:
regular expressions. These are used for general string pattern matching. See ?regex
globs. These are typically used by UNIX shells. See ?Sys.glob
You seem to be thinking in terms of globs but .Rbuildignore uses regular expressions. To convert a glob to a regular expression try
> glob2rx("*pdf")
[1] "^.*pdf$"
See help(regex) for help on regular expression, esp. the Perl variant, and try
.*pdf
.*Rdata
instead. The 'dot' matches any chartacter, and the 'star' says that it can repeat zero or more times. I just tried it on a package of mine and this did successfully ignore a pdf vignette as we asked it to.
In a perl regexp, use .*? as a wildcard.
But I think that what you actually want is pdf$ and Rdata$ as entries in .Rbuildignore seem to affect files whose paths they match only partially, too. $ means "end of the path".
* is a quantifier that attaches to a previous expression to allow between 0 and infinite repetitions of it. Since you have not preceded the quantifier with an expression, this is an error.
. is an expression that matches any character. So I suspect that you want .*pdf, .*Rdata, etc.

RegexKitLite not matching square brackets

I'm trying to match usernames from a file. It's kind of like this:
username=asd123 password123
and so on.
I'm using the regular expression:
username=(.*) password
To get the username. But it doesn't match if the username would be say and[ers] or similar. It won't match the brackets. Any solution for this?
I would probably use the regular expression:
username=([a-zA-Z0-9\[\]]+) password
Or something similar. Notes regarding this:
Escaping the brackets ensures you get a literal bracket.
The a-zA-Z0-9 spans match alphanumeric characters (as per your example, which was alphanumerc). So this would match any alphanumeric character or brackets.
The + modifier ensures that you match at least one character. The * (Kleene star) will allow zero repetitions, meaning you would accept an empty string as a valid username.
I don't know if RegexKitLite allows POSIX classes. If it does, you could use [:alnum:] in place of a-zA-Z0-9. The one I gave above should work if it doesn't, though.
Alternatively, I would disallow brackets in usernames. They're not really needed, IMO.
Your Regular Expression is correct. Instead, you may try this one:
username=([][[:alpha:]]*) password
[][[:alpha:]] means ] and [ and [:alpha:] are contained within the brackets.