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Pulling dates out of (very) unstructured text

JerryFish

We have a customer who is processing medical information (e.g. unstructured text typed up by doctors and nurses). The customer wants to specifically pull Date information out of the text. Here's an example of what they might need to process:

That would be relatively simple enough if we could guarantee that the dates would always be in the same format, but we can't. I can see a somewhat involved script with several If/Then's that could account for as many date formats as we could think of. Just wondering if there is a quicker/shorthand way that already exists to do the same thing?

Accepted answers

DonMcCormack

You might be able to do this using the Custom Regex functionality in Text Explorer. A lot will depend on how easily the dates can be delineated from text. Stuff with a regular form, specifically stuff with a delimiter other than a space, or where the day or week or name of month appears, shouldn't be hard. It's the stuff with all numbers and no delimiters, like 11122016 that's challenging. Although, if you want to assume that anything with 6 or 8 digits is/isn't a date, then things get easier.

Don

All comments

DonMcCormack

Don

Mark_Bailey

Another facility is JMP patterns. I don't use them much but in some cases they are exactly what I need. You (1) build them and then (2) use them to find what you want. They are very flexible for both steps.

They are an alternative to regular expressions.

JerryFish

Thank you Don! This forced me to learn about Custom Regex, which I needed to do anyway. This certainly works, as does Mark's suggestion of using a formula to do the work (still requiring Regex formatting knowledge).

Thanks very much!

Jerry

JerryFish

Mark, thanks for the suggestion! I had to do a little digging to find the Pattern functions in the Formula Editor though. It is listed in Help under "Character Pattern Functions", but these don't show up in the Formula Editor list of function categories. I see Regex under the "Character" category, and Match under "Conditional". This makes it harder (as a user) to find the functions. Do you know why Help doesn't seem to match with the actual Formula Editor?

Thanks!

Jerry

Mark_Bailey

I am not a developer so I cannot answer your question.

Since formulas a just JSL expressions, you can also use the Help > Scripting Index to get information and bridge to more details in the Help system. If you set this browser to Functions, you will find a separate group in the first list for Character Pattern.

JerryFish

Thanks Mark!