GA and RegEx

Separating Dr from Andrew etc.

[chewy]

Hi,

So I get it basically about regular expressions but I don't quite know how to apply them to Google Analytics other than just a cook-book application - say as applied on the Lunametrics site or in Brian Clifton's book about same.

Let's say I want to find the occurrence of the term Dr. (with or without the period) in either search history or content viewing using the "Find" box at the bottom of a GA page.

I type in "DR" and I get all instances of DR, such as in Andrew. How do I filter out other instances of DR but only when it is used to mean as a title, say a medical doctor?

Of course DR. also doesn't work, nor does DR with a space.

Thanks,

-C

[ergophobe]

You want to search for complete words, which means using the zero width word separator character (don't know if GA supports it, but it's a standard regex)

\bdr\.?\b

That will find only dr and dr. In PCRE flavor of regex, you can also set case insensitivity with i flag. If not available, you can make character classes, in which case

\b[dD][rR]\.?\b

That find all case combos (though dR is unlikely!).

Final alternative
\b(Dr¦DR¦dr)\.?\b

Which finds only the three options listed

[chewy]

works fabulously !

I remember that WebmasterWorld somehow converts the pipe "¦" to some other character, so type in the pipe key (us keyboards this is the key with the backslash "\" shifted)

Amazing!

[ergophobe]

>>WebmasterWorld somehow converts the pipe

Yes, thanks for remembering that!

>>Amazing!

I'm glad you share my sense of wonder at the power of regex. I tried to get a seminar of historians to understand why they absolutely had to learn them in order to find textual variants in old documents. They were blown away by some sample searches on a large corpus of texts, but I could see in their eyes that 30 minutes later not a one of them would know what a regex was.

[chewy]

So, ah, is there a cribsheet on how to use this, say and combine one search with another, negatives, etc?

I know some of you guys "think" this way but for the life of me, this is very hard to figure out, remember etc.

[g1smd]

Is "Dr." or "Dr" always placed at the beginning of the string? If it is, you can also start-anchor the pattern.

[ergophobe]

Generally the word boundary search (\b) should catch every case the start anchor (^) would.

They're both zero-width operators, but one is more specific than the other, so there's really no need unless you would want Dr.? stripped at the beginning of a line only, but not in the main text.

[chewy]

still hoping for a cribsheet on how to do simple booleans or exclusions using regex with GA.

how do I see doctors widgets and doctors'widgets separate from doctors?

-and I know some brains totally get this stuff - I just didn't happen to win that gene in the genetic lottery or something!