Jeff Thompson

Hi all, been banging my head against the wall for many, many hours.

I'm building a zip code lookup as part of a much larger project. It uses a txt file I got from the US Census Bureau.

When using numbers that do not start with a zero (ex: 55446), everything works great; when I use zip codes that start with zero (ex: 07042), however, problems ensue.

I can format a "re" message for jit.str.regexp for all numbers and everything seems like it should work just fine, but no.

The message to jit.str.regexp looks like this:

which works fine when the number is larger:

Patch needs the attached txt file, a reduced version of the full thing.

Thanks all, any help would be so awesome and appreciated!

I'm building a zip code lookup as part of a much larger project.  It uses a txt file I got from the US Census Bureau.

The message to jit.str.regexp looks like this:
re 08904","\w*","\w*
which works fine when the number is larger:
re 68510","\w*","\w*

jit-str-regexp-with-leading-zeros

How about this? According to a quick google search, that second zip should be Highland Park, NE, and the patch only gives Highland, so you still have a bit more tweaking to do. If you can't get that working, post again.

Surprisingly (or not), the first person answering my question is the only person on the forum I know personally... even though the statistical chances of that seem like they should be zero!

Thanks for taking a look, seems like what it really needed was a fresh set of eyes. Also thanks for getting ready of some extra objects.

So it does work for one word city names, but not two. If I change the message box to say:

it works for two letter cities but now does not work for one letter ones.

to search for either one or two but that didn't work at all.

I feel like I'm slowly getting sprintf and regexp but how I would love an hour or two with someone who really gets it.

I should also add that I found a really great Flash program (

) that lets you put in any text and try to match it. It was a huge help.

Surprisingly (or not), the first person answering my question is the only person on the forum I know personally...  even though the statistical chances of that seem like they should be zero!

Thanks for taking a look, seems like what it really needed was a fresh set of eyes.  Also thanks for getting ready of some extra objects.

So it does work for one word city names, but not two.  If I change the message box to say:
$1","\w*","\w* \w*
it works for two letter cities but now does not work for one letter ones.

Also, I tried:
$1","\w*","\w*|\w* \w*
to search for either one or two but that didn't work at all.

I should also add that I found a really great Flash program (http://www.gskinner.com/RegExr) that lets you put in any text and try to match it.  It was a huge help.


This should do the trick. I've changed the last bit of your regex so that instead of searching for \w word characters it searches for [^"]* anything except a "quote". This, along with the ZIP and state are stored in backreferences and formatted into a list which is [zl slice]-d at the end. This way it should return the city/town name no matter how many words it is. It also adds zero padding to the ZIP code if it is less than 5 numbers and throws an error if it is more than five.

I'm not at all familiar with jstrigger: sort of like trigger and expr rolled into one? In this case, is it evaluating a string?

Also, why did you add the parentheses in the sprintf object? Does that change it's behavior or just to make it easier to see?

I'm not at all familiar with jstrigger: sort of like trigger and expr rolled into one?  In this case, is it evaluating a string?

Also, why did you add the parentheses in the sprintf object?  Does that change it's behavior or just to make it easier to see?


The [jstrigger] object is for formatting with javascript, it can be a bit like [expr] and [sprintf] depending on how you use it. Here it just finds the length of a string. The (parentheses) create back references which are output from a different outlet of the [jit.str.regexp] object. I use them to find the specific data you are interested inside the search string.

jit.str.regexp with leading zeros