Question

I am struggling with nailing down a fairly complex regular expression to parse song titles with optional artist attribution from loosely-typed English. The user input comes from a single text field and the regex matches will be used to query a song database to get unique track IDs. I need to be able to get these matches:

• \1 = song title
• \2 = artist

while being fairly liberal in allowed formats.

Examples

The wold "by" should split the string into song title and artist (but only on word boundaries); as should a comma with/without trailing whitespace:

baby one more time by britney spears

baby one more time, britney spears

baby one more time,britney spears

• \1 = baby one more time
• \2 = britney spears

False positives like these are acceptable:

down by the bay

• \1 = down
• \2 = the bay

whatever people say i am, that’s what i’m not

• \1 = whatever people say i am
• \2 = that’s what i’m not

…assuming quotes can be used to mark a run of text as a song title explicitly:

"down by the bay"

• \1 = down by the bay
• \2 not matched

"whatever people say i am, that’s what i’m not" by arctic monkeys

• \1 = whatever people say i am, that’s what i’m not
• \2 = arctic monkeys

Single quotes should work too, but obviously not if they appear within the title:

‘whatever people say i am, that’s what i’m not’

• \1 = whatever people say i am, that
• \2 = s what i’m not’

Additionally, if quotes are in use, the word "by" or a comma are optional:

"down by the bay" raffi

• \1 = down by the bay
• \2 = raffi

However, if there are no quotes, and more than one "by", then only the last "by" should be used as a delimiter:

down by the bay by raffi

• \1 = down by the bay
• \2 = raffi

Is this even possible with a single regex? Or would the more sane way be to split it up into multiple expressions? Either way, what might this look like?

Answer 1

Here is an example, using C#:

var regex = @"^((""(?<title>[^""]+)""|'(?<title>[^']+)')(\s*,\s*|\s+by\s+)?|(?<title>.*)(\s*,\s*|\s+by\s+))\s*(?<artist>.*)$";

var items = new []{
    "baby one more time by britney spears",
    "baby one more time, britney spears",
    "baby one more time,britney spears",
    "down by the bay",
    "whatever people say i am, that's what i'm not",
    "\"down by the bay\"",
    "\"whatever people say i am, that's what i'm not\" by arctic monkeys",
    "'whatever people say i am, that's what i'm not'",
    "\"down by the bay\" raffi",
    "down by the bay by raffi",
};

foreach (var item in items)
{
    var match = Regex.Match(item, regex, RegexOptions.ExplicitCapture);
    Console.WriteLine(match.Groups["title"] + " - " + match.Groups["artist"]);
}

Output matches your specification, as far as I can tell:

baby one more time - britney spears
baby one more time - britney spears
baby one more time - britney spears
down - the bay
whatever people say i am - that's what i'm not
down by the bay - 
whatever people say i am, that's what i'm not - arctic monkeys
whatever people say i am, that - s what i'm not'
down by the bay - raffi
down by the bay - raffi

You can actually make it better for the single-quote case by allowing apostrophes inside words:

var regex = @"^((""(?<title>[^""]+)""|'(?<title>([^']|(?<=\w)'(?=\w))+)')(\s*,\s*|\s+by\s+)?|(?<title>.*)(\s*,\s*|\s+by\s+))\s*(?<artist>.*)$";

Which fixes this case:

whatever people say i am, that's what i'm not - 

Here’s a commented version of the regex, which explains what each part does (should be matched with RegexOptions.ExplicitCapture|RegexOptions.IgnorePatternWhitespace):

var regex = @"
^
  (
    (
      ""(?<title>[^""]+)""               (?# matches a double-quote string )
    | '(?<title>([^']|(?<=\w)'(?=\w))+)' (?# matches a single-quote string, allowing quotes in words )
    ) (\s*,\s*|\s+by\s+)?   (?# optionally follow these by ',' or 'by' )
  | 
  (?<title>.*)(\s*,\s*|\s+by\s+) (?# otherwise, everything up to ',' or 'by' )
)
\s*(?<artist>.*) (?# everything after this is the artist name )
$";

Edit:

I’ve played around a bit with the PHP code, but I can’t get it to use named capturing groups properly. Here is a version using unnamed capturing groups:

$regex = "/^(?:(?:\"([^\"]+)\"|'((?:[^']|(?<=\\w)'(?=\\w))+)')(?:\\s*,\\s*|\\s+by\\s+)?|(.*)(?:\\s*,\\s*|\\s+by\\s+))\s*(.*)\$/";

preg_match($regex, '"down by the river"', $matches);

print_r($matches);

The title will be in group 1, 2, or 3, and the artist in group 4.