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Question

Matching the right pattern

  • 1 September 2022
  • 4 replies
  • 43 views
F

Hey everyone,

 

I have a zap that listens for a Discord message then searches that message for a date and time. To search for the pattern of the date I’m using “Extract Pattern” on the Formatter using this pattern: 

\d/\d\d/\d\d\d\d|\d\d/\d/\d\d\d\d|\d/\d/\d\d\d\d|\d/\d/\d\d|\d/\d\d/\d\d|\d\d/\d/\d\d|\d\d/\d\d/\d\d|\d/\d\d/\d\d\d\d

Essentially this is just looking for all variations of typing the date. This works pretty well except when people put a 4 digit year. Even though I have the pattern in there, the zap just picks the first two digits out of the year and thinks it’s found the MM/DD/YY pattern instead. So now people putting the date 2022 are having their events post in ‘20. I’ve tried putting the 4 digit year pattern at the beginning and end of the “Pattern” field but this continues to happen either way.

 

How can I make sure the zap searches for the 4 digit year first and if it finds it, uses that instead of looking for another possible match?

 

Thanks!

This post has been closed for comments. Please create a new post if you need help or have a question about this topic.

4 replies

Danvers
Userlevel 7
Badge +12

Hi @FWD!

I am by no means a regex expert, but I did some Googling and found this expression, which might help:

^(?:(?:31(\/|-|\.)(?:0?[13578]|1[02]))\1|(?:(?:29|30)(\/|-|\.)(?:0?[1,3-9]|1[0-2])\2))(?:(?:1[6-9]|[2-9]\d)?\d{2})$|^(?:29(\/|-|\.)0?2\3(?:(?:(?:1[6-9]|[2-9]\d)?(?:0[48]|[2468][048]|[13579][26])|(?:(?:16|[2468][048]|[3579][26])00))))$|^(?:0?[1-9]|1\d|2[0-8])(\/|-|\.)(?:(?:0?[1-9])|(?:1[0-2]))\4(?:(?:1[6-9]|[2-9]\d)?\d{2})$

 

I think that the format of this will match for dates that are day/month/year, so if you’re working with US formatted dates, you’ll need to switch it around a bit. I found a way of testing it on this site. As an fyi, that’s not an official Zapier resources, just something a found with some Googling, so do check the formula for yourself before you use it. 

 

If anyone else has any ideas on how to edit @FWD’s query to account for years that may be 2 or 4 digits, it’d be great to hear them!

F

Hey Danvers,

 

This seems to capture some date formats but not all of them. I unfortunately don’t have the know how to fix this to include the ones I need which are:

 

MM/DD/YYYY, M/DD,YYYY, MM/D/YYYY, M/D/YYYY, MM/DD/YY, M/DD/YY, MM/D/YY, and M/D/YY

 

 

F

Just a quick update, I found a good expression: ^(?:(?:(?:0?[13578]|1[02])(\/|-|\.)31)\1|(?:(?:0?[1,3-9]|1[0-2])(\/|-|\.)(?:29|30)\2))(?:(?:1[6-9]|[2-9]\d)?\d{2})$|^(?:0?2(\/|-|\.)29\3(?:(?:(?:1[6-9]|[2-9]\d)?(?:0[48]|[2468][048]|[13579][26])|(?:(?:16|[2468][048]|[3579][26])00))))$|^(?:(?:0?[1-9])|(?:1[0-2]))(\/|-|\.)(?:0?[1-9]|1\d|2[0-8])\4(?:(?:1[6-9]|[2-9]\d)?\d{2})$

 

That matches all formats I need, however it doesn’t seem to extract the pattern out of a wall of text. Only if the only input is the date itself. For my purposes, I need the expression to find the date in a wall of text like this:

Date to be sent: 09/05/2022
Time to be sent: 10:00AM

 

Can someone please help me modify this to search in the full message and not only look for the full message to match the pattern? Thanks in advance!

jesse
Userlevel 7
Badge +9

Hey @FWD! I’ve checked with a few folks on our end but unfortunately, we’re not super familiar/well-versed in regex expressions. 😔 So while we can’t help from the Zapier side, I will leave this thread open incase there is another community member who might be able to help!

CCing @Troy Tessalone, @MohSwellam @Moshe770 and @andywingrave here incase any of y’all have ideas to share!

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