CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regex
dbaalke
dbaalke

Reputation: 11

Regular expression for extracting substring in the middle of a string

Looking for a regular expression that extracts multiple characters, at different locations, in my string. For example, the string I'm working with is 5490028400316201600008 and it will always be this same length, but the numbers can change.
I would like to extract the first 9 characters, then skip the next 8, extract the next 4, then ignore the last character. The resulting string would be 5490028400000 in this case. I can't seem to find an easy way to do this and I'm fairly new to regular expressions. Thanks in advance for your advice/help.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2007

Answers (1)

Jan
Jan

Reputation: 43199

First of all, this seems more appropiate for substring functions, they are usually faster and not so error-prone. However, for a learning purpose, you could come up with sth. like:

(.{9}).{8}(.{4}).

This matches any (not only digits, that is - for digits use \d instead) character 9 times, saves it in a group, matches another 8 characters which will not be saved, and will finally match another 4 characters into the second group.
Concenate $1 and $2 (5490028400000 in your case) and you should be fine.
See this demo on regex101.com.

Upvotes: 1

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