CODEWITHSUNDEEP
filebatch-filedirectory
Thomas Jones
Thomas Jones

Reputation: 23

Batch how to read part of a folder name from directory

Morning,

Id like to read all folder names from a directory but then extract part of this name to a text file.

E.g.

Folder \users\music has these folders within: Tes125559-blah345534 tes125558-blah235235

Id like to extract 3 characters in until the -, so for Tes125559-blah345534 im after just the 125559 to be put into a text file.

Its always 3 chars in then a 6 digit numeric value that needs grabbing

Any help is very appreciated, so far I only read the directory:

dir /b > file.txt

Upvotes: 0

Views: 75

Answers (1)

TripeHound
TripeHound

Reputation: 2960

Something like the following should do the trick:

@echo off
        setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
        if exist file.txt del file.txt
        for /d %%a in (*) do (
                set DIR=%%a
                echo !DIR:~3,6!>>file.txt
        )

The for loop iterates over all directories (in the current directory). For each one, it stores the directory name in DIR and then uses a "sub-string" syntax to extract six characters starting at the fourth (the 3 is because it counts from zero -- see SET /? for more information).

The use of ! around this construct (and enabledelayedexpansion at the top of the script) is because the normal way of referring to environment variables (with %) would not re-evaluate the value of %DIR% each time around the for loop (see cmd /? for more details).

Because each directory is appended to the file.txt, we delete it before we start (if it exists).

Upvotes: 1

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