Snowflake does not support backreferences in regular expression patterns (known as "squares" in formal language theory); however, backreferences are supported in the replacement string of the REGEXP_REPLACE function. Regex Expression for Snowflake Pattern Asked 5 years, 2 months ago Modified 5 years, 2 months ago Viewed 3k times. The regular expressions are commonly used functions in programming languages such as Python, Java, R, etc.
The Snowflake regular expression functions identify the precise pattern of the characters in given string. Regular expressions are commonly used in validating strings, for example, extracting numbers from the string values, etc. PATTERN with REGEX in COPY command to fetch only relevant feed files.
The backslash character \ is the escape character in regular expressions, and specifies special characters or groups of characters. For example, \s is the regular expression for whitespace. The Snowflake string parser, which parses literal strings, also treats backslash as an escape character.
Regular expressions allow for powerful pattern matching in SQL. Snowflake provides the REGEXP_LIKE function to perform regular expression matching in a SQL query. REGEXP_LIKE Performs a comparison to determine whether a string matches a specified pattern.
Both inputs must be text expressions. REGEXP_LIKE is similar to the [NOT] LIKE function, but with POSIX extended regular expressions instead of SQL LIKE pattern syntax. It supports more complex matching conditions than LIKE.
The reason is that Snowflake processes the string given (i.e. the Regex pattern) then passes the string to be processed again by the Regex function. This means that Snowflake processes the first backslash before the Regex function has a chance to view it.
Dive deeper into the realm of precision text retrieval using Snowflake's versatile toolset featuring the powerhouse function, REGEXP_SUBSTR. REGEXP_LIKE Performs a comparison to determine whether a string matches a specified pattern. Both inputs must be text expressions.
REGEXP_LIKE is similar to the LIKE function, but with POSIX extended regular expressions instead of SQL LIKE pattern syntax. REGEXP_LIKE supports more complex matching conditions than LIKE.