topic Re: Extracting characters within certian pattern including square brackets in Discussions

Extracting characters within certian pattern including square brackets

eugur — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 16:46:45 GMT

Hi,
I have want to extract information from a text in a table row that includes square brackets.
Example Rows in text column:
Plate[QWE147] Reg[ABC123]
Plate[ASD258] Reg[DEF456]

Information I want to extract:
ABC123

DEF456

What is the best way to do this? I wanted to do it with regex but square brackets makes it complicated.

Re: Extracting characters within certian pattern including square brackets

jthi — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 17:03:48 GMT

You have to do some escaping

Names Default To Here(1);

str1 = "Plate[QWE147] Reg[ABC123]";
str2 = "Plate[ASD258] Reg[DEF456]";

Show(Regex(str1, "Reg\!\[(.+)]$", "\1"));
Show(Regex(str2, "Reg\!\[(.+)]$", "\1"));

Re: Extracting characters within certian pattern including square brackets

jthi — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 17:19:55 GMT

Also using Word(-1,...) might be enough if your strings are simple enough

Names Default To Here(1);

str1 = "Plate[QWE147] Reg[ABC123]";
str2 = "Plate[ASD258] Reg[DEF456]";

Show(Word(-1, str1, "[]")); // Word(-1, str1, "[]") = "ABC123";
Show(Word(-1, str2, "[]")); // Word(-1, str2, "[]") = "DEF456";

Re: Extracting characters within certian pattern including square brackets

eugur — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 17:28:39 GMT

Thank you. This works perfect. Could you please explain why "$" is in the code?

Re: Extracting characters within certian pattern including square brackets

jthi — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 18:46:15 GMT

Most likely unnecessary, but it just tries to make sure it matches at the end

Re: Extracting characters within certian pattern including square brackets

pmroz — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 19:54:47 GMT

You can also use the word function:

Names Default To Here(1);
str1 = "Plate[QWE147] Reg[ABC123]";
str2 = "Plate[ASD258] Reg[DEF456]";
show(word(4, str1, "[]"));
show(word(4, str2, "[]"));