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I need a regular expression that can be used to find the Nth entry in a comma-separated list.
For example, say this list looks like this:
abc,def,4322,[email protected],3321,alpha-beta,43
...and I wanted to find the value of the 7th entry (alpha-beta).
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The 0-9 indicates characters 0 through 9, the comma , indicates comma, and the semicolon indicates a ; . The closing ] indicates the end of the character set. The plus + indicates that one or more of the "previous item" must be present.
It indicates that the subpattern is a non-capture subpattern. That means whatever is matched in (?:\w+\s) , even though it's enclosed by () it won't appear in the list of matches, only (\w+) will.
Semicolon is not in RegEx standard escape characters. It can be used normally in regular expressions, but it has a different function in HES so it cannot be used in expressions. As a workaround, use the regular expression standard of ASCII.
In regex, there are basically two types of characters: Regular characters, or literal characters, which means that the character is what it looks like. The letter "a" is simply the letter "a". A comma "," is simply a comma and has no special meaning.
My first thought would not be to use a regular expression, but to use something that splits the string into an array on the comma, but since you asked for a regex.
most regexes allow you to specify a minimum or maximum match, so something like this would probably work.
/(?:[^\,]*,){5}([^,]*)/
This is intended to match any number of character that are not a comma followed by a comma six times exactly (?:[^,]*,){5} - the ?: says to not capture - and then to match and capture any number of characters that are not a comma ([^,]+). You want to use the first capture group.
Let me know if you need more info.
EDIT: I edited the above to not capture the first part of the string. This regex works in C# and Ruby.
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