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Asked: 2026-05-17T19:41:00+00:00

First, I don’t know if this is actually possible but what I want to

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First, I don’t know if this is actually possible but what I want to do is repeat a regex pattern.
The pattern I’m using is:

sed 's/[^-\t]*\t[^-\t]*\t\([^-\t]*\).*/\1/' films.txt

An input of

250.    7.9    Shutter Island (2010)    110,675

Will return: 

Shutter Island (2010)

I’m matching all none tabs, (250.) then tab, then all none tabs (7.9) then tab. Next I backrefrence the film title then matching all remaining chars (110,675).

It works fine, but im learning regex and this looks ugly, the regex [^-\t]*\t is repeated just after itself, is there anyway to repeat this like you can a character like a{2,2}?

I’ve tried ([^-\t]*\t){2,2} (and variations) but I’m guessing that is trying to match [^-\t]*\t\t?

Also if there is any way to make my above code shorter and cleaner any help would be greatly appreciated.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I think you might be going about this the wrong way. If you’re simply wanting to extract the name of the film, and it’s release year, then you could try this regex:

    (?:\t)[\w ()]+(?:\t)

    As seen in place here:

    http://regexr.com?2sd3a

    Note that it matches a tab character at the beginning and end of the actual desired string, but doesn’t include them in the matching group.

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