Regular Expression search for text at the beginning of a line - ^

A caret ^ can be used in a RegEx search to specify that you are focusing on strings that start at the beginning of a line of text. In this example I'm showing how this RegEx feature can be employed in the Visual Basic macro to run Regular Expression searches that was the September 2, 2015 Tip of the Night. I've modified the code in this way with the aim of being able to pick out instances of numbered lines (instances where a line begins with a number (whether one digit, two digit, or three digit) followed by a period and a space, or a letter, a period and a space. So this Regex will find

1. Paris

1c. Sofia

22. London

27b. Warsaw

100. Berlin

101a. Rome

. . . and so forth

Before entering this macro be sure to go in Visual Basic to Tools . . . References . . . and check off Microsoft VBScript Regular Expressions 5.5.

Function findRegex(sentance) Dim regEx As New VBScript_RegExp_55.RegExp Dim matches, s regEx.Pattern = "^[0-9]. |^[0-9][0-9]. |^[0-9][0-9][0-9]. |^[0-9][a-z]. |^[0-9][0-9][a-z]. |^[0-9][0-9][0-9][a-z]. " regEx.IgnoreCase = True 'True to ignore case regEx.Global = True 'True matches all occurances, False matches the first occurance s = "" If regEx.Test(sentance) Then Set matches = regEx.Execute(sentance) For Each Match In matches s = s & "" s = s & "" & Match.Value & " " s = s & Chr(10) Next findRegex = s Else findRegex = "" End If End Function

So when we enter the findRegex search that this formula (=findRegex) creates in a column in Excel, we get these results:

This is useful in parsing out the statements and responses which are given in a Rule 56.1 Statement of Facts filed for a summary judgment motion. It's easy enough to tag the response with a LEFT formula - =IF(LEFT(A1,10)="Response: ","Response","") - and once you've got the beginning of each statement and each response tagged separating them into separate columns can be accomplished quite easily as I'll explain tomorrow night when I can stay up later . . . ; )

Regex for finding dates

Here's a simple Regex to find dates in different formats:

[0-3]?[0-9]/[0-3]?[0-9]/(?:[0-9]{2})?[0-9]{2}

So if we have a text file like this one:

. . . and we run the Regex search this way in PowerGrep

We get these results:

Thanks to Lokesh Gupta for posting this regular expression at http://howtodoinjava.com/regex/java-regex-date-format-validation/

Searching for & % # in Relativity

With default settings, & % #, can't be searched for in dtSearch in Relativity. If you need to run a search for these characters follow these steps:

Add the special character to the alphabet file, by going to the Search Indexes tab, clicking Edit next to dtSearch and then scrolling down to the Alphabet section:

. . . enter the special character four times after the end of the row with the four Zs. Save and then click 'Build Index: Full' .

You then need to run a Regex search in dtSearch to locate a string with the character. Regex searches always need to be preceded with two number signs. The special character will be substituted with '\W'. So to search for AT&T you enter this search:

"##at\Wt"