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C# Regex filter problems

At this moment in time, i posted something earlier asking about the same type of question regarding Regex. It has given me headaches, i have looked up loads of documentation of how to use regex but i still could not put my finger on it. I wouldn't want to waste another 6 hours looking to filter simple (i think) expressions.
So basically what i want to do is filter all filetypes with the endings of HTML extensions (the '*' stars are from a Winforms Tabcontrol signifying that the file has been modified. I also need them in IgnoreCase:
.html, .htm, .shtml, .shtm, .xhtml
.html*, .htm*, .shtml*, .shtm*, .xhtml*
Also filtering some CSS files:
.css
.css*
And some SQL Files:
.sql, .ddl, .dml
.sql*, .ddl*, .dml*
My previous question got an answer to filtering Python files:
.py, .py, .pyi, .pyx, .pyw
Expression would be: \.py[3ixw]?\*?$
But when i tried to learn from the expression above i would always end up with opening a .xhtml only, the rest are not valid.
For the HTML expression, i currently have this: \.html|.html|.shtml|.shtm|.xhtml\*?$ with RegexOptions.IgnoreCase. But the output will only allow .xhtml case sensitive or insensitive. .html files, .htm and the rest did not match. I would really appreciate an explanation to each of the expressions you provide (so i don't have to ask the same question ever again).
Thank you.

For such cases you may start with a simple regex that can be simplified step by step down to a good regex expression:
In C# this would basically, with IgnoreCase, be
Regex myRegex = new Regex("PATTERN", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
Now the pattern: The most easy one is simply concatenating all valid results with OR + escaping (if possible):
\.html|\.htm|\.shtml|\.shtm|\.xhtml|\.html*|\.htm*|\.shtml*|\.shtm*|\.xhtml*
With .html* you mean .html + anything, which is written as .*(Any character, 0-infinite times) in regex.
\.html|\.htm|\.shtml|\.shtm|\.xhtml|\.html.*|\.htm.*|\.shtml.*|\.shtm.*|\.xhtml.*
Then, you may take all repeating patterns and group them together. All file endings start with a dot and may have an optional end and ending.* always contains ending:
\.(html|htm|shtml|shtm|xhtml).*
Then, I see htm pretty often, so I try to extract that. Taking all possible characters before and after htm together (? means 0 or 1 appearance):
\.(s|x)?(htm)l?.*
And, I always check if it's still working in regexstorm for .Net
That way, you may also get regular expressions for the other 2 ones and concat them all together in the end.

Regular expressions redirection

I want to set redirection from
www.somesite.com/products/dynamicstring/randomtext1/randomtext2
to www.somesite.com/products/dynamicstring
Is it possible to do that through Regex ?
It means if my incming url is
www.somesite.com/products/myproducts/test1/test2 it should redirect to www.somesite.com/products/myproducts/
just briefing more about this :
#TomLord i am using HttpContext.Current.Response.RedirectPermanent(matchingDefinition.To) i have all the redirects "From" and "To" in a class object, in the form of REGEX expressions.Example in From "/product/*" and To "/products" , i am reading these object and trying to redirect them, but i am not able to redirect something like /products/dynamicstring/randomtext1/ to /products/dynamicstring where dynamic string is random string , i dont find any regular expression which can be use to do this. For example /products/samples/randomtext1 should redirect to /products/samples/

Redirection cannot be done with regex alone. Google a bit what is a regular expression in reality. The short answer is: it's string-like expression that describes search pattern. So it can't redirect, not even replace a substring with substring or do anything else then match and capture parts of the matched string.
That being said, regex can help us do what you wanna. I am gonna assume you can use Javascript, cause I can't put a solution in every language. I am also gonna assume you will try to go over the code not copy paste and press enter. If you only need that hire a programmer. If you use another language, principle should be the same:
obtain URL
define regex
use capture group to extract the part of your URL that you need
construct a new URL
redirect to it
While matching the URLs in general is a fair bit more complex, like:
^(?:https?://)?(?:[\w]+\.)(?:\.?[\w]{2,})+$
As long as you are sure you will only be getting URLs and in the format you wanna, we will do it far simpler.
Basically, let's say you have:
some text with 2 dots that ends in com
then a /products/dynamicstring/
then text
then /
then text
As a regex that is:
/\w*.\w*.com\/products\/dynamicstring\/\w*\/\w*/g
Curde matching is done, but we still need to add a capture group we will use to extract part of the string we need:
/(\w*.\w*.com\/products\/)dynamicstring\/\w*\/\w*/g
Oke, now let's leverage this regex to do rest of the work:
Define regex:
var regex = /\w*.\w*.com\/products\/dynamicstring\/\w*\/\w*/g;
Get current URL. If you already have URL use it.
var currUrl = window.location.href;
Extract capture group from string:
var match = regex.exec(currUrl);
Use that to get a new URL from old one:
var redirectUrl = match[1] + myproducts/
Finally, we redirect with:
window.location.replace(redirectUrl);
I wrote all this straight from my head so I recommend you go over each step, look how it works, read some documentation about functions used. You might find an error as well as learn a lot.

Matching a term that contains nested HTML

I have been having trouble finding a solution to this problem.
I am parsing the content of a number of ebooks, finding specific terms and characters, marking the locations and lengths of each term.
A normal case would be something like this (excerpts from A Game of Thrones):
"When he paused to look down, his head swam dizzily and he felt his fingers slipping. Bran cried out and clung for dear life."
If we are searching for the character "Bran", its location is 85 and length is 4. Easy enough.
My issue arises when there is a paragraph like this:
<span height="-0em"><font size="7">D</font></span>aenerys Targaryen wed Khal Drogo
We need to match "Daenerys Targaryn". It is easy enough to strip the HTML and match the string, but in this example the result needs to include the HTML. Thus the expected result would here be would be location = 0, length = 67.
Another situation, caused by random anchor tags scattered throughout:
Did anyone outside the Vale even suspect where Catelyn <a></a>Stark had taken him?
Again, searching for "Catelyn Stark" needs to include the HTML, so location = 47, length = 20.
I have been able to get around it temporarily by adding those specific cases (searching for "Catelyn <a></a>Stark specifically), but clearly I should have a more robust solution, which I cannot seem to get my head around. My attempts have been using RegEx but with limited success.
I have found various questions regarding HTML matching/stripping (and whether or not to use RegEx =)), but this case seems to be somewhat unique.
Stripping the tags isn't an option as the content must be preserved.
This is within a stand-alone C# application.
Any ideas, steps in the right direction, or similar examples should your search go better than mine would be greatly appreciated!

One possible approach would be to insert the following between each letter in your search string:
(?:<[^>]*>)*
So when searching for the character "Bran" your regex would become the following:
(?:<[^>]*>)*B(?:<[^>]*>)*r(?:<[^>]*>)*a(?:<[^>]*>)*n
This will allow your regex to match any number of HTML tags anywhere within the search string. Note that this will only work if your search strings are always something simple like a character's name, and not regular expressions (this method will fail if there is repetition like a* in your search string).

I would create a function that would take "Daenerys Targaryn" as a parameter and then strip the first letter. Then, it would only search for "aenerys Targaryn," and if found, it would search for ">D<" or the first variable letter. Does than make sense?
Example:
public static string searchFor(string str)
{
// strip first letter of search string (in this case "D")
// search for the rest of the string ("aenerys Targaryn")
// if found, search for ">D<"
// if found, search for HTML tags with "D" inside (using regex)
// if found, search for HTML tags with the previous HTML tag in them (using regex)
return result;
}

Well using Javascript or Php you can get the text of elements and the text of documents and search there and then do a regex to return the closest match (containing the html):
Another option:
would be to index the books first using something like Lucene Search Engine (which happens to let you index in different formats (html format being one of them).
You can then use the Lucene api to search your documents a little easier.
In php we have Zend_Search_Lucene which works perfectly for this kind of thing.
Lucene Search can be found at:
http://lucene.apache.org/core/
Have fun!

Best way to get links from strings that contain them

I have a list of links, but I need to FILTER-OUT and EXTRACT correct links from the String.
Extract should start with mywebsite.com and which end with 9-digitnumber.html
Links are strings, extracted to string
Example
http://blah.com?f=www.mywebsite.com/sdfsf/sdfsdf/sdfsdfsdf/123456789.html&sdfsdf/sf/sdfsd8sdfsdfsdf
and so on...
From this, regex must extract
mywebsite.com/sdfsf/sdfsdf/sdfsdfsdf/123456789.html
This should match the number in the end
'#"[0-9]{9}". but I am very new to regex and trying to learn how to use it properly

Parsing HTML with regexs is usually a bad idea. For you particular example, you can use:
(mywebsite.com/(.+?)\d{9})
but as Andrew said, using a regex for doing what you want is not really necessary.

/mywebsite\.com\/[a-zA-Z0-9\/]*[0-9]{9}\.html/

Regular expression to define format of backup filenames

In the application I am currently working on, I have an option to create automatic backups of a certain file on the hard disk. What I would like to do is offer the user the possibility to configure the name of the file and its extension.
For example, the backup filename could be something like : "backup_month_year_username.bak". I had the idea to save the format in the form of a regular expression. For the example above, the regexp would look like :
"^backup_(?<Month>\d{2})_(?<Year>\d{2})_(?<Username>\w).(?<extension>bak)$"
I thought about using regex because I will also have to browse through the directory of backuped files to delete those older than a certain date. The main trouble I have now is how to create a filename using the regex. In a way I should replace the tags with the information. I could do that using regex.replace and another regex, but I feel it's a big weird doing that and it might be a better way.
Thanks
[Edit] Maybe I wasn't really clear in the first go, but the idea is of course that the user (in this case an admin that will know regex syntax) will have the possibility to modify the form of the filename, that's all the idea behind it[/Edit]

... and if the regex changes, it is next to impossible to reconstruct a string from a given regex.
Edit:
Create some predefined "place-holders": %u could be the user's name, %y could be the year, etc.:
backup_%m_%y_%u.bak
and then simple replace the %? with their actual values.

It sounds like you're trying to use the regular expression to create the file name from a pattern which the user should be able to specify.
Regular expressions can - AFAIK - not be used to create output, but only to validate input, so you'd have the user specify two things:
a file name production pattern like Bart suggested
a validation pattern in form of a regular expression that helps you split the file names into their parts
EDIT
By the way, your sample regex contains an error: The "." is use for "any character", also \w only matches one word character, so I guess you meant to write
"^backup_(?<Month>\d{2})_(?<Year>\d{2})_(?<Username>\w+)\.(?<extension>bak)$"

If the filename is always in this form, there is no reason for a regex, as it's easier to process with string.Split ...

With Bart's solution it is easy enough to split (using string.Split) the generated file name using underscore as the delimiter, to get back the information.

Ok, I think I have found a way to use only the regex. As I am using groups to get the information, I will use another regular expression to match the regular expression and replace the groups with the value:
Regex rgx = new Regex("\(\?\<Month\>.+?\)");
rgx.Replace("^backup_(?<Month>\d{2})_(?<Year>\d{2})_(?<Username>\w+)\.(?<extension>bak)$"
, DateTime.Now.Month.ToString());
Ok, it's really a hack, but at least it works and I have only one pattern defined by the user. It might not work if the regex is too complex, but I think I can deal with that problem.
What do you think?