Hello Monks,

I am faced with a common task of parsing log files that are in no particular format at all. The only thing I can count on is that each entry in the log will be on it's own line. In the past I have simply created as many regular expressions as was necessary to parse 100% (or close to it) of the log file.

Before doing the same thing this time, and manually creating all of those expressions, I am curious - have any of you out there experimented with automatically generating a regular expression based on several lines of source data? Did it end up working for you or not?

I have looked around a little bit, and came across this website, which appears to tackle part of this experiment, but it derives it's expression from one line of input, and not many: http://www.txt2re.com/.

I appreciate any advice, even if it's to drop the idea altogether because it Just Won't Work (tm).

In reply to Automatically generate regular expression from source data by onelesd

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