Posts tagged "parse Text"

Using a Regular Expression (RegEx) to Find a URL and not an email address

A subscriber reached out to me (after trying for a few hours) for some help on creating a Regular Expression to pull-out URLs from text. Specifically not including email addresses. Since he gave it a solid try I wanted to help him out. I did a google search and found this post which had the RegEx pattern for finding a URL and not an email address. I then took the pattern and put it on Regular Expressions 101 to make sure it would work in AutoHotkey. After that I adapted it to AutoHotkey code (see below) using RegExMatch.

Find a URL and not an email address

Code to Find a URL and not an email address

Finding the last instance of a character in a string with StirSplit and InString with AutoHotkey

I thought I’d demonstrate a bit more how InStr() and StirSplit work. In the below example I work through how to find the last comma in each row of data.

StirSplit and InString with AutoHotkey

String=
(
Dallas,Fort Worth, TX
Coppell,TX
Old town, Alexandria, VA
Novato,CA
)

;*********Use For loop over Var going line by line*********************
for i, row in Loopobj:=StrSplit(String,"`n","`r") { ;use For loop to parse over line breaks
	 S:=StrSplit(Row)
	 for k, v in S
		m(k,v)
	Pos:=InStr(Row,",",,0,1)
	MsgBox % SubStr(Row,1,InStr(Row,",",,0,1)-1) "`r`r" trim(SubStr(row,InStr(Row,",",,0,1)+1))
	
}
return

AutoHotkey Webinar- Spreading AHK Luv & Making Money with AutoHotkey

In our first hour of today’s webinar we talked through the below points on how to improve adoption rate of AutoHotkey for users as well as making money with AutoHotkey.

The second hour dove a bit deeper into both topics and discussed other subjects related to these.

Script Highlight:

FindText – Capture Screen Image & Find it

Don’t let the name “FindText” fool you (it isn’t about ‘text’)

Things to keep in mind:

Make sure you keep the same: Screen resolution, magnification, font, zoom
Test Grayscale vs Color
You can adjust the size of the capture area (but smaller is generally better)
Tutorial 1 demonstrating the function and an Example using it
Function to help take action on what you find

PowerPoint deck / Resources:

Which best describes your Organization’s current RPA (Robotics Process Automation) adoption level?
Here is the full Slide deck, podcast, and book entitled: Service Automation: Robots and the Future of Work 2016 by Leslie P. Willcocks (Author), Mary Lacity (Author)

Misconceptions of RPA / Desktop Automation

Desktop Automation

…is only used to reduce workload & lay-off employees
…is mainly driven by cost savings
…completely replaces the need for a person

Why Don’t More People Automate / Use AutoHotkey?

People do notlike change. (correlation with age?)
People don’t realize what canbe automated (“think small” – “magic redo” button?)
Managers / Decision makers think it is “too expensive”
No “GUI” to use for creating scripts. Non-techies get “overwhelmed” with coding.
Everyone is “too busy” to learn how to save time. Even though they’re interested in saving time they don’t find time to learn how to automate. (Story of a wood cutter is a great analogy; remember to take time to ‘sharpen the saw’)
Some people are too proud to let-on that they really don’t understand what you’re doing. They might try it on their own but get frustrated and give up after 15 minutes. (Perhaps reviewing 1-1 is better than in groups?)
Managers oftendo not encourage their employees to automate. (I’ve had several bosses that told me NOTto automate.)
Most people think short-termand not long-term. This can present itself in the following dimensions
The job is “too small” to be automated (almost never true)
The job is a “1-time” need (rarely, if ever, the case; the “job” might be but the “approach” is bound to come up again)
I’m the only one that would use this (rarely the case)
It will take too long to write code to automate (I think this is one of the best things about AutoHotkey. FAST!)
It must be “fully automated” (No need to automate the entire process)
Not considering “side-effects” of automation (tracking log to examine events, employee / customer satisfaction etc.)

Best Approach to Get Adopters

1.Don’t overwhelm them with all that AutoHotkey can do!

Only get them to learn 1 thing!
Give them time to learn/adopt that and then come back with additional tips

2.Curtail what you demonstrate to the prospect’s level

Luddites- Stick to HotKeys and HotStrings
Somewhat Nerdy- Demonstrate some scripts, Input box, Sending keystrokes / Clicks, File manipulation
Nerds- Whatever their need! (Dll calls, Image search, API calls, Web Scraping, Objects, RegEx, GUIs, etc.)

3.Get a senior-level advocate (Director or above)

Senior people see the cost-savings
Your supervisor will think your coding is counting against “their time”
Colleagues might be worried you’re “automating” them out of a job
IT also might try and road-block you. Get the business to “demand” it

4.Create custom script for their needs

Don’t build in all bells-whistles

Making Money with AutoHotkey

General Models

Selling generic programs / scripts to large audience
Selling custom scripts to individuals / company
Getting paid to code (they own the intellectual property) & you get paid by hour

Getting Paid

Licensing

One time fee – how prevent piracy
Service Licensing (monthly / yearly)- tracking
- EasydigitalDownloads- Software licensing
Hardware footprint- Motherboard specific vs many things with WMI tasks
Use social login : Facebook, Google, Twitter , LinkedIn, via API call to login to verify
Price Sensitivity (Estimating what you can charge)

Shareware / Freeware / Donations

PayPal , Patreon, Bitcoin: Blockchain RushWallet
Freelancer , Flattr , Reddit
Donation Coder , Fiverr
Upwork, CodeCanyon

“Rich” Target markets

Lots of people doing same job function
“Thankless” / mundane jobs with clear logic/ “rules-based” descisions and structured data
Lots of, repetitive, transactions
Non-programming “business” people
People with Money!!!
Sales people!
Realestate

Incentives / Benefits to Highlight to Potential Clients

Employee / man-hour savings resulting in high ROI (Return on Investment)
Better quality results than from humans / Higher compliance
Faster deployment getting things done (clients / customers are happier)
Increased scalability
Happier, more productive, employees
Have more “Meta-Data” to do analysis on
The more you do, the easier it gets
The more you automate, the more time you have to automate

AutoHotkey Webinar- Parsing plain text with AutoHotkey

Video Hour 1: High-level overview:

In the first hour of our AutoHotkey webinar we demonstrated Quick Access Popup from our guest speaker Jean Lalonde. It is an amazingly customizable tool that allows you to have what you want at your fingertips!

Here is an abbreviated list of some of the great features:

Create shortcuts to folders, programs, files, links, Snippets, special folders, etc.
Easily create Hotkeys for above shortcuts
Works with most Open/Save dialog boxes
Integrated with most file managers (Windows Explorer, Directory Opus, Total Commander, etc.)
The tool itself is highly customizable
Have “shared” sections as well as individual ones
Organize your menu into folders & sub-folders
Customize Menu/GUI shortcut with an icon (that makes sense to you)
Available in 10 languages

You can watch a short overview video here or get a deeper dive here. Jean was kind enough to walk me through his tool in this video.

We then talked about what a “text file” is and frequent sources of them (Export from programs, sever logs, emails, etc). We also briefly discussed what is File / Character Encoding & why are there frequent problems with it (this is a very deep topic which we could have spent days discussing!)

Also discussed what a “flat file” is and how they are different than:

Multi-row files
Relational files
XML and JSON files

We then shared some of the frequently used built-in commands and functions for parsing text in AutoHotkey.

File Object, FileOpen, FileRead, FileReadLine, Loop (read file contents ), Loop Files & Folders– Opening / reading a text file
FileAppend – Writes text to the end of a file (first creating the file, if necessary).
FileEncoding – Sets the default encoding for FileRead, FileReadLine, Loop Read, FileAppend, and FileOpen
IfInString/ InStr() – Checks if a variablecontains the specified string.
Loop (parse a string) – Retrieves substrings (fields) from a string, one at a time. (CSV helpful option)
RegExMatch () / ~= – Determines whether a string contains a pattern (regular expression). (Check out RegEx Webinar)
RegExReplace () – Replaces occurrences of a pattern (regular expression) inside a string.
SplitPath – Separates a file name or URL into its name, directory, extension, and drive.
StringLen / StrLen() – Retrieves the count of how many characters are in a string.
StringLeft, StringRight – Retrieves a number of characters from the left/right-hand side of a string.
StringMid/ SubStr() – Retrieves one or more characters from the specified position in a string.
StringSplit / StrSplit() – Separates a string into an array of substrings using the specified delimiters.
Trim(), Ltrim (), Rtrim () AutoTrimm – Trims characters from the beginning and/or end of a string.

Then we got into various custom-built in libraries and functions

ObjCSV Library & CSVBuddy by Jean Lalonde
TF : Textfile & String Library for AutoHotkey Forum link from HugoV
String Things from tidbit
StringMod () String Manipulation – Enhanced by PhiLho / Titan
StringSlice () by SKAN
CSV Library by kdoske
Table Manipulation by VxE
Sift – Fuzzy Search by RegEx and Ngram by FanaticGuru
Elaborate CSV Functions by trueski
CSVed – not ahk but cool (free) program that works with any delimiter by Sam Francke

Then our guest speaker, Jean, took over walking us through some examples of common problems with AutoHotkey LoopParse command

Loop, Parse, InputVar [, Delimiters, OmitChars]
If Delimiters is “CSV”, InputVarwill be parsed in standard comma separated value format.
About CSV http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values

The library is pretty cool and here are some of the main functions available:

CSV2Collection() – Transfer the content of a CSV file to a collection of objects.
Collection2CSV() – Transfer the selected fields from a collection of objects to a CSV file.
Collection2Fixed() – Transfer the selected fields from a collection of objects to a fixed-width file.
Collection2HTML() – Builds an HTML file based on a template where variables are replaced with content.
Collection2XML() – Builds an XML file from the content of the collection.
Collection2ListView() – Transfer the selected fields from a collection of objects to ListView.
ListView2Collection() – Transfer the selected lines of the selected columns of a ListView to a collection of objects.

ObjCSV Examples: Here are the files Jean worked through.

SIMPLE CSV FILE – COMA DELIMITED (TheBeatles-coma.txt)
SIMPLE CSV FILE – TAB DELIMITED – ISSUE #1 (TheBeatles-tab.txt)
MULTI-LINE CSV FILE – COMA DELIMITED – ISSUE #2 (TheBeatles-Lyrics.txt)

Jean then gave us a review of how to use his ObjCSV library

Example using ObjCSV_CSV2Collection
SIMPLE CSV FILE – COMA DELIMITED (TheBeatles-coma.txt)
SIMPLE CSV FILE – TAB DELIMITED – ISSUE #1 SOLVED (TheBeatles-tab.txt)
MULTI-LINE CSV FILE – COMA DELIMITED – ISSUE #2 SOLVED (TheBeatles-Lyrics.txt)
PROGRESS BAR WITH LARGE CSV FILE – SEMI-COLON DELIMITED (LargeFile-semicolon.txt)
CUSTOM HEADER – SIMPLE CSV FILE – COMA DELIMITED (TheBeatles-coma.txt)
GUI Example using Collection2ListView
SAVING WITH DIFFERENT DELIMITER using ObjCSV_Collection2CSV
EXPORT HTML Example using ObjCSV_Collection2HTML

Wrapping up the first section we then saw a peak at CSVBuddy

CSVBuddy Examples

Reading large file with auto-detection
Editing field names, re-order or select fields
Saving options
Saving file with multi-line content converted to single-line (Excel-ready)
Reverting the single-line file to multi-line (for example, after manipulation in Excel)

Video Hour 2: Q&A:

In the second hour we discussed various issues working with text data as well as took a deeper look into Quick Access Popup.

Near the end of the time Capn Odin shared a Trie script he’s been working on. You can check out the script on the forum

Tag: parse Text