Question

Add padding to single digits

Asked by: knowlton

result = Regex.Replace("5/1/2009","^(\d{1,2})(-|/)(\d{1,2})(-|/)(\d{4})", "${year}${month}${day}");

yields:

200951

but what I want is:

20090501




Is there a change I can make to

${year}${month}${day}

so that it will pad single-digit months and days with a "0"   ??


Thanks,


Tom

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Asked On
2009-11-04 at 14:45:39ID24872846
Topic

Regular Expressions

Participating Experts
1
Points
500
Comments
4

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Answers

 

by: bounsyPosted on 2009-11-05 at 13:29:59ID: 25754250

Regular expression engines generally don't support conditional insertion during replacement/substitution.  (Perl does via executable code in the second part of the substitution, but it's the only one I'm aware of.)

The better approach would be to pad the numbers first (using another regex, if you like), then perform your regex.  An example (untested) follows that is supposed to replace every non-padded digit in the first two places (month and day) with a padded version.

result = Regex.Replace(Regex.Replace("5/1/2009", "(^|-|/)(\d)(-|/)", "${1}0${2}${3}"),"^(\d{1,2})(-|/)(\d{1,2})(-|/)(\d{4})", "${year}${month}${day}");

                                              
1:

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by: knowltonPosted on 2009-11-06 at 14:09:38ID: 25763515

for some reason result contains this:

"${year}${month}${day}"

instead of

"20090501"

 

by: bounsyPosted on 2009-11-06 at 14:32:18ID: 25763660

I used your original regex when I made the modifications.  I'm guessing that, at some point, you were using named captures.  Here's a version that uses the numeric values.

result = Regex.Replace(Regex.Replace("5/1/2009", "(^|-|/)(\d)(-|/)", "${1}0${2}${3}"),"^(\d{1,2})(-|/)(\d{1,2})(-|/)(\d{4})", "${5}${1}${3}");
                                              
1:

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by: knowltonPosted on 2009-11-21 at 10:47:37ID: 31650281

I haven't tried this yet, but I trust you tested it.  If I have any questions I'll post them here.

Tom

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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