Question

Can you please help to derive a regular expression that matches the bold-italics portion of below string? Characters in X will change. This information is from a log file. I need to remove all the timestamps from the log file.

[6/14/12 18:10:XX:XX CDT] 000001234 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Answer 1

For example, in Perl, assuming that the X’s are alphanumeric:

/\[6/14/12\s18:10:\w{2}:\w{2}\sCDT\]\s000001234/

If you also want to capture the varying characters, you can put them in parentheses, then use backreferences:

/\[6/14/12\s18:10:(\w{2}):(\w{2})\sCDT\]\s000001234/

Other languages similar with slight variations in syntax.