Extracting numbers from text strings, removing unwanted characters

[Peter Campbell]

Not being familiar enough with regular expressions, can somebody do the
following?

Extract a number from a text string.
To keep it simple I want to remove all non-numeric characters and return
the result as a number.

Typically keep all [0-9] and "." and "-" characters.
Presumably only keep 1 instance of decimal place and minus/hyphen.

I am importing numeric values from a file and typically the input string
will only contain leading dollar sign, commas, digits, decimals and
maybe a hyphen.

Note: I have looked at some regular expressions for numbers but of
course these aren't removing unwanted characters.

[Michael A. Cleverly]

On Mon, 24 Jun 2002, Peter Campbell wrote:

> Not being familiar enough with regular expressions, can somebody do the
> following?
>
> Extract a number from a text string.
> To keep it simple I want to remove all non-numeric characters and return
> the result as a number.

% set input "As seen on TV, the cost is \$19.95"
As seen on TV, the cost is $19.95
% regexp -- {-?\d+(\.\d+)?} $input number
1
% set number
19.95
% regexp -inline -- {-?\d+(?:\.\d+)?} $input
19.95

The pattern above: {-?\d+(\.\d+)?} translates to:

-? An optional hyphen;
\d+ followed by one or more digits;
(\.\d+)? optionally followed by a single period and then one or more
digits.

The quantifier "?" matches 0 or 1 occurences, "+" matches 1 or more, and
(not used in the above example), "*" matches 0 or more. If your input
could contain something like -.235 then you would want a pattern of:
{-?\d*(\.\d+)?} instead.

The period matches any (single) character, which is why we preceeded it
with a backslash to "escape it". If we didn't, then the pattern could
match a non-number like (for example) "-321-0" or "9z4". Braces are used
instead of quotes to avoid having to "double up" the backslashes.

Since the first character of the regular expression was a hyphen, we
preceed the pattern with -- so that the regexp engine doesn't mistakingly
try and interpret our pattern as (an invalid) switch.

In the regexp "non-capturing" parenthesis are used so that just the whole
match is returned {19.95}. If we'd used regular paranthesis, as we did in
the first example, [regexp -inline] would have returned a list made up of
the whole match, and then what the paranthesis "captured" {19.95 .95}.

All of the ins and outs are documented on the re_syntax man page. See:
http://wiki.tcl.tk/re_syntax

> Typically keep all [0-9] and "." and "-" characters.
> Presumably only keep 1 instance of decimal place and minus/hyphen.
>
> I am importing numeric values from a file and typically the input string
> will only contain leading dollar sign, commas, digits, decimals and
> maybe a hyphen.

To remove anything that isn't a digit, hyphen, or period, you could use
[regsub] like this:

% set input "\$1,000,000 is a lot of money"
$1,000,000 is a lot of money
% regsub -all -- {[^0-9.-]} $input "" number
21
% set number
1000000

If your data is consistant, and you need only remove a leading $ and
commas, you could also use [string map]:

% set input \$1,995.99
$1,995.99
% set number [string map [list $ "" , ""] $input]
1995.99

If you only needed to remove a leading $, you could use:

% set input \$995.00
$995.00
% string trimleft $input $
995.00
% string range $input 1 end
995.00

Michael

[Glenn Jackman]

It may be helpful if you provide an example of typical input.
If the input string is delimited in some way (commas, colons, etc)
then it's wisest to split on that delimiter.

You seem to be asking for a brute force regexp solution which
may not be in your best interest. For example

set input {$1.23, $-5.00, $15.99}
regsub -all {[^0-9.-]} $input "" numbers
set numbers ;# ==> returns garbage "1.23-5.0015.99"

Please give us some more info about the typical input.

On Mon, 24 Jun 2002 10:40:45 +1200, Peter Campbell <p...@acs.co.nz> wrote:
> Not being familiar enough with regular expressions, can somebody do the
> following?
>
> Extract a number from a text string.
> To keep it simple I want to remove all non-numeric characters and return
> the result as a number.
>
> Typically keep all [0-9] and "." and "-" characters.
> Presumably only keep 1 instance of decimal place and minus/hyphen.
>
> I am importing numeric values from a file and typically the input string
> will only contain leading dollar sign, commas, digits, decimals and
> maybe a hyphen.

--
Glenn Jackman
gle...@ncf.ca

[arvind...@gmail.com]

sir, what would be the approach if in a single sting we will have multiple numeric values. How to get all numeric values?

For multiple strings having multiple numeric values, how to obtain them?

[Arjen Markus]

On Monday, March 20, 2017 at 9:18:00 AM UTC+1, arvind...@gmail.com wrote:
> sir, what would be the approach if in a single sting we will have multiple numeric values. How to get all numeric values?
>
> For multiple strings having multiple numeric values, how to obtain them?

You can use the -all option to [regexp]. With -inline you get a list of matching substrings.

Regards,

Arjen