SAPIEN Technologies

I seem to find my self turning to regular expressions more often these days, often to help out a fellow scripter in one of the many scripting forums I keep tabs on. I thought I’d take a moment and provide a brief explanation on how to use regular expressions in VBScript. First off, for those who don’t know, a regular expression is a way of identifying or matching a string against a pattern. For example we all know that 172.16.100.200 looks like an IP address because of its pattern. The string roygbiv@rainbow.net looks like an email address, again based on the pattern. A regular expression can be used identify strings based on a pattern.

Regular expressions don’t necessarily validate the data. 172.16.100.200 looks like an IP but whether it is valid or not is another story. I know there are some very complex regular expression patterns you can use that will. For our purposes we’ll stick to more basic patterns.

A pattern can be a simple as another string, but usually you don’t know the exact string and you want to find a pattern. To accomplish that you need to build a regular expression pattern using elements like these.

Regular Expression Characters

I won’t go into detail about every element but I offer this table so that as you find regular expression patterns to use you’ll be able to decipher them. You’ll see some examples in a moment, but first back to VBScript.

In a VBS file, we will create a Regular expression object using the New keyword.

Set RegEx = New RegExp               

This object has several properties we can set. First, we can configure our regular expression to be case sensitive or not.

RegEx.IgnoreCase = True               

Regular expressions can be configured to find the first match or all matches. By setting the Global property to True, we’ll get all matches.

RegEx.Global=True                  
Finally we need to assign a pattern.

RegEx.Pattern=”\w+”

The RegEx object will match on any alphanumeric character that is repeated. Suppose we want to find the strings in “SAPIEN Technologies”. I’ll use the RegEx object’s Test() method to see if the pattern matches.

Regex.Test(“SAPIEN Technologies”)

This method returns True if there is a match. Another way I could have accomplished this, and especially if I wanted to see what the pattern matched is to use the Execute() method.

Set colMatches=RegEx.Execute(strString)

Any matches will be stored as an array which is easy enough to enumerate.

for each match in colMatches

wscript.echo match.value

next

If I run this code I’ll see that I got matches on “SAPIEN” and “Technologies”. Nothing matched on the space separating the two words. Let’s modularize what we have so far into a few functions.

Function RegExMatch(strString,strPattern)

    Dim RegEx

    RegExMatch=False

    Set RegEx = New RegExp                

    RegEx.IgnoreCase = True                

    RegEx.Global=True                   

    RegEx.Pattern=strPattern

    If RegEx.Test(strString) Then RegExMatch=True

End Function 

Function GetMatch(strString,strPattern)

    Dim RegEx,arrMatches

    Set RegEx = New RegExp                

    RegEx.IgnoreCase = True                

    RegEx.Global=True                   

    RegEx.Pattern=strPattern

    Set colMatches=RegEx.Execute(strString)

    Set GetMatch=colMatches

End Function

The RegExMatch function will return True if the string matches the regular expression pattern.

strString=”123.45.67.89″
strPattern=”^\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}$”

If RegExMatch(strString,strPattern) Then
    WScript.Echo strString & ” looks like a valid IP address.”
Else
    WScript.Echo strString & ” does NOT look like a valid IP address.”
End If

Because my string matches the regular expression pattern exactly, notice I’m using the ^ and $ anchors, I’ll get a positive result back.

Or perhaps I need to parse a line from a log file pulling out IP addresses.

strString=”2009-04-14 15:00:53 172.16.10.1 PROPFIND /admin$. – 80 – 172.16.10.102 Microsoft-WebDAV-MiniRedir/6.0.6001 403 2 0″
strPattern=”\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}”

If RegExMatch(strString,strPattern) Then
    Set matches=GetMatch(strString,strPattern)
    For Each match In matches
     ‘ignore the web server IP
     If match.value <> “172.16.10.1” then
        WScript.Echo match.value
     End If
    Next
End If

If the pattern matches, then I call the GetMatch function to retrieve the matching values. In this case, I’ll get a match for 172.16.10.12. I’ll be back later to have more fun with regular expressions and VBScript.

You can also learn more about regular expressions and VBScript in WSH and VBScript Core: TFM.