Again you're missing the point.
I think the best thing you can do is post a relatively small sample of the
text you are attempting to parse.
While you're doing that, execute the following and observe the results. It
demonstrates what I am talking about:
Dim _source As String = "On 07/01/2007 the quick brown fox jumps over the
lazy dog." & Environment.NewLine & _
"On 08/01/2007 the quick brown fox again jumps over the lazy dog." &
Environment.NewLine & _
"On Jan/09/2007 the quick brown fox again jumps over the lazy dog." &
Environment.NewLine & _
"On 10/Jan/2007 the quick brown fox again jumps over the lazy dog." &
Environment.NewLine & _
"On 11/01/07 the quick brown fox again jumps over the lazy dog." &
Environment.NewLine & _
"On 01/12/07 the quick brown fox again jumps over the lazy dog." &
Environment.NewLine & _
"On Jan/13/07 the quick brown fox again jumps over the lazy dog." &
Environment.NewLine & _
"On 14/Jan/07 the quick brown fox again jumps over the lazy dog." &
Environment.NewLine & _
"On 15/01 the quick brown fox again jumps over the lazy dog." &
Environment.NewLine & _
"The part number XYZ/72/84 is now discontinued."
Dim _regex As New
Regex("\d{2}/\d{2}/\d{4}|[A-Za-z]{3}/\d{2}/\d{4}|\d{2}/[A-Za-z]{3}/\d{4}|\d{
2}/\d{2}/\d{2}|[A-Za-z]{3}/\d{2}/\d{2}|\d{2}/[A-Za-z]{3}/\d{2}|\d{2}/\d{2}")
Dim _candidates As Integer = 0
Dim _matches As Integer = 0
Dim _match As Match = _regex.Match(_source)
While _match.Success
_candidates += 1
Console.WriteLine("{0} found at index {1}", _match.Value, _match.Index)
Try
Console.WriteLine("Converted value = {0:yyyy-MM-dd}",
DateTime.ParseExact(_match.Value, New String() {"dd/MM/yyyy", "MM/dd/yyyy",
"MMM/dd/yyyy", "dd/MMM/yyyy", "dd/MM/yy", "MM/dd/yy", "dd/MMM/yy",
"MMM/dd/yy", "dd/MM"}, Nothing, DateTimeStyles.None))
_matches += 1
Catch _ex As Exception
Console.WriteLine(_ex.Message)
End Try
_match = _match.NextMatch()
End While
Console.WriteLine("{0} candidates found", _candidates)
Console.WriteLine("{0} matches found", _matches)
GS said:
You are sort of on the same track as mine.
I must first apologize I did not tell you the complete story.
Although the application does not exactly know before hand what format the
data may come in, however part of the application allow user to define and
record favourite for a website
- to extract by text or html
- header content and format
- record format and date format ( that is where the date format mask
come in)
- optionally ordinal number for each column or re-ordering
- trailer content and format
For a given batch, at least for the body, date format are uniform
furthermore, the need to make the extract process generic and adaptable to
the front end that takes the user definitions, I believe it would be
easier
to "normalize" date string to "yyyy-mm-dd".
Also the end target for of may not necessarily be SQL database but may be
text, pasted to word report. or excel by user
Therefore, I can transform the date format mask to regex in the
appropriate
format and identifier I can use regex,replace to normalize the date. As a
matter of fact the date separator does not have to / but can be space as
long as there are identifiable delimiter around the date string.
I already have code for dealing with regex for dates from prior project.
all I have to do is adapt to the present need
who knows, maybe I taken on a totally offbeat tract
part
2:
