produce a report on data formats in columns as indicated in the following:
Column A Column B Column C
alphabetic words/phrases digits like xxxxx.xx alphanumeric identifiers
City of London 5 digits followed by a iso12345
decimal point and 2
digits indicating precision
It is a bit like detecting regular expression patterns automatically.
Is automatically detecting something like regular expression patterns possible?
Yep, and the answer for any text column you give me is:
^.*$
If you want a classification system where you have more (already known) complex RegularExpressions and you want to choose the best fit that is also possible, and probably much more useful.
For anything else you need a better problem specification. And I'd probably tend toward wanting to run some kind of AI system on the data - i.e., not something I'd perform in-database.
