
Regex Generator++, THE Automatic Generator of Regular Expressions from Examples - ftarlao
http://regex.inginf.units.it/index.html
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pisdrul
What about if I want to extract a text based on a pattern which comes before
the match?

eg:

Hello name: carl Your name: simon Enter your name: mark

I am only interested in the first name and not in the string "name:". Will it
works?

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ftarlao
Yes it works, it finds out the 'shape' of the surrounding text and it writes a
regex using lookarounds operators which does the work right. So, yes, it
builds an extractor which is able to extract only "simon" and "mark"

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2swarovsky
seems an interesting project, but I don't understand why the examples are
splitted into "training" and "validation": sometimes the regex doesn't extract
correctly all the strings and I suspect this is due to the dataset splitting.

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ftarlao
Splitting the learning set in training and validation sets is very important.
The validation set is used in order to select the solutions which have
generalized (or understood) the problem for real. When you use all the
knowledge for training, the algorithm can overfit, providing a solution that
has a great performance on the training examples but has poor performance when
you use it, for real, on unseen text. Splitting in training and validation
leads to better solutions.

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maradona84
uhmmm... "evolving regex", something already seen:
[http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/technical-
reports/papers/TR-09-02.p...](http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/technical-
reports/papers/TR-09-02.pdf)

~~~
ftarlao
Evolving regexes or programs is not an unknown topic but this is the only
online tool which is able to find out regexes for text extraction, a real
world application, that works for real. I have not find out other sites or
applications able to do the job, providing a good solution.

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mimmuz
great! ...but now you have 3 problems! :D

