How to extract substring in Fish shell?

Question

I got the following variable:

set location "America/New_York"

and want to display only the part before the / (slash) using fish shell syntax.

Expected result

America

Bash equivalent

Using bash, I was simply using a parameter expansion:

location="America/New_York"
echo ${location##*/}"

Question

How do I do that in a fish-way?

Answer 1

Since fish 2.3.0, there's a builtin called string that has several subcommands including replace, so you'll be able to do

string replace -r "/.*" "" -- $location

or

set location (string split "/" -- $location)[1]

See http://fishshell.com/docs/current/commands.html#string.

Alternatively, external tools like cut, sed or awk all work as well.