Question

I don’t know if this is properly expressed but here’s the example:

I got a few hundred lines like this ones:

word1.word2.word3.1.09
word1.word2.2.14
word1.word2.word3.word4.3.22
word1.1.09

and I want to convert those to:

word1 word2 word3 1.09
word1 word2 2.14
word1 word2 word3 word4 3.22
word1 1.09

So far I reached this point that matches those:

(([a-z0-9]+).+)([0-9]+.[0-9]+)

And usually I would space the $1 $2 $3, but in this case the $1 matches multiple times the first alphanumeric text. Can I do this just with regex or I got to process the $1 afterwards with another language?.

Answer 1

For the (presumably invented) sample input you gave, this will work:

\.(?!\d{2}$)  # search string

" "           # replace string: a single space

i.e., this looks for the periods you want to strip out, and replaces them with a space.

Explained:

\.     # look for a period, but ignore it if the negative lookahead matches:
(?!    # open negative lookahead
\d{2}$ # look for exactly two digits, at the end of the string
)      # close lookahead