Question

I have no experience with regular expressions and would love some help and suggestions on a possible solution to deleting parts of file names contained in a csv file.

Problem:

A list of exported file names contains a random unique identifier that I need isolated. The unique identifier has no predictable pattern, however the aspects which need removing do. Each file name ends with one of the following variations:

V, -V, or %20V followed by a random number sequence with possible spaces, additional “-“,”” and ending with .PDF

examples:

GTD-LVOE-43-0021 V10 0.PDF
GTD-LVOE-43-0021-V34-2.PDF
GTD-LVOE-43-0021_V02_9.PDF
GTD-LVOE-43-0021 V49.9.PDF

Solution:

My plan was to write a script to select of the first occurrence of a V from the end of the string and then delete it and everything to the right of it. Then the file names can be cleaned up by deleting any “-” or “_” and white space that occurs at the end of a string.

Question:

How can I do this with a regular expression and is my line of thinking even close to the right approach to solving this?

Answer 1

REGEX: [\s\-_]V.*?\.PDF

Might do the trick. You’d still need to replace away any leading – and _, but it should get you down the path, hopefully.

This would read as follows..

start with a whitespace, - OR _ followed by a V. Then take everything until you get to the first .PDF