Hi all,

 

I searched for this in the forum, but nothing covered this exactly. I am trying to find lines in a file which contain a date (the date format is yy/mm/dd) twice - these lines are no good and I need to investigate them further. In between those dates can be anything, I don't care what is in between. I tried this:

([0-9]{2}/(0?[1-9]|1[012])/(0?[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01])){2}.*$

but that didn't give me the result I was hoping for. Can someone point me in the right direction ?

 

Thanks in advance ! 

hiro 

(?=.*\d\d/\d\d/\d{4}.*\d\d/\d\d/\d{4}).*

test
test 11/11/1111
test 11/11/1111 test 11/11/1111
test 11/11/1111
test
test 11/11/1111 test 11/11/1111 test 11/11/1111

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OK I'm reading this question differently than ddrudik so my quesion is to the OP.

Are you checking to see if there are two dates  in a line, or to see if the same date is in the line twice?  I took it to be the latter.

If so my suggested pattern is

((?:\d\d/){2}\d{2}).+?\1.*

 Next time please follow the Posting Guidelines http://regexadvice.com/forums/thread/47451.aspx and provide a sample of your real data if possible. It helps in understanding the problem

---

Michael

"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not."
Albert Einstein

mash,

You are right - apologies for forgetting to post a sample. Here it is, a sample from the file:

********,001,08/10/01,07:53,999,39754,000000003,10,246205,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1500,0,774,
********,001,08/10/01,07:53,999,39754,000000004,10,257442,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,295,0,0,
********,001,08/10/01,07:53,999,39755,000000001,01,999,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,
********,001,08/10/01,07:53,999,39755,000000002,10,256053,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,6000,0,3500,

The problem is that I am concatenating the file from many smaller files (all of the same format) and somewhere, the concatenation must have gone wrong because a date appears twice in one line. It could be the same date, or a different date (I am fairly sure it would be the same date that appears twice in that line but no way to be certain...)
The lines always end in a comma.

 

Thank you very much for your time in helping me with this problem.
 

hiro 

Thank you ddrudik !

 

That's what I need (except the format is yy/mm/dd but I think my regex knowledge, rudimentary though it is, should be good enough to modify =)

 

Thanks again,

hiro