# Creating a Table from Regex
**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/creating-a-table-from-regex/63201
**Category:** Data
**Tags:** regex, tables
**Created:** [June 19, 2021, 9:55pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/creating-a-table-from-regex/63201 "2021-06-19T21:55:50Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@oxinabox](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/oxinabox)
#### Post date: [June 19, 2021, 9:55pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/creating-a-table-from-regex/63201/1 "2021-06-19T21:55:50Z")
It occurred to me that it would be nice to be able to create a table from a string by providing a regex that uses named groups.
nushell’s `parse` function ([docs](https://www.nushell.sh/book/commands/parse.html), [example](https://www.nushell.sh/cookbook/parsing.html)) does this.
A `RegexMatch` has all the right things for a Tables.jl row, except it doesn’t provide `getproperty` overloads as historically it’s fields were part of it’s public API (though that has progressively become less true, it would be too breaking to change that now).
But we can wrap a `RegexMatch` in a suitable type.
(Might as well use `Tables.AbstractRow` though we could go down the `getproperty` route instead if we would rather).
```julia
using Tables
struct RegexMatchRow <: Tables.AbstractRow
match::RegexMatch
end
Tables.getcolumn(m::RegexMatchRow, i::Int) = getfield(m, :match)[i]
Tables.getcolumn(m::RegexMatchRow, i::Symbol) = getfield(m, :match)[i]
Tables.columnnames(m::RegexMatchRow) = Symbol.(keys(getfield(m, :match)))
```
Example:
```julia
julia> pattern = r"(?P\w+) +(?P-?\d+) +(?P-?\d+) +(?P-?\d+) +(?P\d+) +(?P\d+) +(?P\w+) +(?P.*)";
julia> DataFrame(RegexMatchRow.(match.(pattern, eachline(`wmctrl -l -G`))))
5×8 DataFrame
Row │ id desktop x y width height pc title
│ SubStrin… SubStrin… SubStrin… SubStrin… SubStrin… SubStrin… SubStrin… SubStrin…
─────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
1 │ 0x02800003 -1 0 56 3760 2372 Aji @!0,28;BDH
2 │ 0x02000001 0 324 471 2677 1942 Aji Slack | * data | Julia
3 │ 0x04200003 0 20 44 2376 2372 Aji Latest Domains/Data topics - Jul…
4 │ 0x04000010 0 176 -36 2832 1604 Aji julia-master /home/oxinabox
5 │ 0x05400038 0 1936 192 1844 2298 Aji new 1 - Notepadqq
```
Something that would be nice to do on top of this would be to infer the types base on the regex.
e.g. if the capture is for `(?P<width>\d+)` we can take a pretty solid guess that this column is `Int`.
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<div class="post-metadata">
### Author:  [@quinnj](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/quinnj)
#### Post date: [June 19, 2021, 11:36pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/creating-a-table-from-regex/63201/2 "2021-06-19T23:36:14Z")
</div>
Yeah, we should include something like this in CSV.jl; having “regex” functionality has come up a few times, but it’s always been a little unclear whether you’d want to specify a regex per cell, or regex delimiter, etc. I think specifying a regex per row with named groups for columns is a clear solution to this. We could make a `CSV.RegexFile` or something to do the iterating/matching for you and implement the tables interface for you.