[StATS]: More on regular expressions (July 21, 2005) Category: Data management
As I work more and more with microarrays, the more I realize that having a knowledge of regular expressions will help. For example, I had a comma separated file (.CSV) and it had an extra comma at the end of every line. I wanted to remove those commas, but not any of the others.
It turns out that my text editor (textpad) will allow search and replace on regular expressions. So I searched for
- ,$
and replaced it with a null string. The dollar sign says to match a string only if it is at the end of a line. If I had wanted to replace any commas that begin a line of text, I could have searched for
- ^,
You can find an earlier version of this page on my website.