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Asked: 2026-06-08T00:26:41+00:00

I am having trouble to create a regular expression that returns only a part

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I am having trouble to create a regular expression that returns only a part of a string.

Passing the following strings:

/path/of/the/file/1 - 2 - Lecture 1.2_ Max Bense (13_49).mp4
/path/of/the/file/1 - 3 - Lecture 1.3_ Michael Friedman (12_15).mp4
/path/of/the/file/2 - 1 - Lecture 2.1_ Paul Feyerabend (12_55).mp4
/path/of/the/file/2 - 2 - Lecture 2.2_ Alhazen (11_37).mp4
/path/of/the/file/3 - 2 - Lecture 3.2_ Study Case - Dominicus Gundissalinus (14_30).mp4 
/path/of/the/file/3 - 3 - Lecture 3.3_ Study Case - Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker (11_48).mp4

It should return only the following parts respectively:

Max Bense
Michael Friedman
Paul Feyerabend
Alhazen
Study Case - Dominicus Gundissalinus
Study Case - Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Use PCRE and Positive Lookbehind

    If you have access to a regular expression engine that supports PCRE expressions, you can use positive lookbehind to get just the text you want from your MP3 listings. For example:

    pcregrep -o '(?<=_ )([^(]+)' /tmp/foo

    Use Sed

    If you don’t have a Perl-compatible grep, then you can use sed instead. It’s a lot less readable, but a lot more portable. For example:

    sed 's/.*_ \([^(]\+\).*/\1/' /tmp/foo
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