regular expression help

[slipstick]

Hello,

I have a string I want to employ a regular expression on to avoid a cascade of match patterns, but I can't seem to get it to work.

The string:

^XA~TA000~JSN^LT0^MMT^MNW^MTT^PON^PMN^LH20,0^JMA^PR4,4^MD0^JUS^LRN^CI0^XZ
^XA^LL0076
^PW376
^BY25,25^FT25,38^BXN,2,200,0,0,1
^FH\^FDP1000^FS
^FT0,56^A0N,20,20^FH\^FDP1000^FS
^FT180,65^A0N,42,40^FH\^FD^FS
^BY25,25^FT150,38^BXN,2,200,0,0,1
^FH\^FDP1001^FS
^FT120,56^A0N,20,20^FH\^FDP1001^FS
^FT180,65^A0N,42,40^FH\^FD^FS
^PQ1,0,1,Y^XZ

What I want out of it is one instance of:

P1000

P1001

In this example. The number portion will be different for other strings, such as P4567, PA34554, etc. It will never vary from P or PA. The number section might be 4 or 5 digits long.

Each of these show up twice in the string.

The regex I was trying to use is:

\^FD*\^FS

and then I was going to weed out the duplicates.

And now my brain gives up.

Tay

[tbob]

The characters "\" and "^" have special meanings in regular expressions.  Why don't you just search for P and PA, followed by numerical characters?

[tbob · Accepted solution]

This vi extracts all P followed by numerical characters.  You have to modify it to include PA.

[slipstick]

Thanks. I wasn't able to get the P or PA search to work either. I don't use regex functions enough to be really familiar with them.

Tay

[jcarmody]

Or this...

I learned a lot from this site.

[tbob]

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@jcarmody wrote:

I learned a lot from this site.

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I need to learn regular expression.  That site has a lot of info.  Thanks Jim.

[slipstick]

Excellent site! And thanks for the code!

Tay

[Darin.K]

I was on travel so I couldn't reply earlier, but I was glad to see Jim defend the honor of the regex.  Call me old-fashioned, but I do not have OpenG installed on all of the machines I come across.  Instead of deleting the duplicates, what I do instead is to use the attribute of a dummy variant to hold the values.  Duplicates are nicely handled and the final iteration errors out when you try to write an empty name.  I do not use it here, but I made the number itself a capture group, so the value of each attribute is the number itself.