Regular Expression to break row with comma separated values into distinct rows

Posted by Nick on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Nick
Published on 2010-05-09T10:01:45Z Indexed on 2010/05/09 10:08 UTC
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regex

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comma-separated

I have a file with many rows. Each row has a column which may contain comma separated values. I need each row to be distinct (ie no comma separated values).

Here is an example row:

AB  AB10,AB11,AB12,AB15,AB16,AB21,AB22,AB23,AB24,AB25,AB99  ABERDEEN    Aberdeenshire

The columns are comma separated (Postcode area, Postcode districts, Post town, Former postal county).

So the above row would get turned into:

AB  AB10    ABERDEEN    Aberdeenshire
AB  AB11    ABERDEEN    Aberdeenshire
AB  AB12    ABERDEEN    Aberdeenshire
...
...

I tried the following but it didn't work...

(.+)\t(([0-9A-Z]+),)+\t(.+)\t(.+)

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