Question

I had this
string=”dontcare noone &11111-&1111-&C00 noone”

and I had to extract the substring &11111-&1111-&C00
from the first & to the first blank

I’ve tried some index and some sed without any luck.

Someone has some great advice?

Answer 1

You can use bash’s string manipulation capabilities:

string="dontcare noone &11111-&1111-&C00 noone"

# remove everything up to the first "&"
string="&${string#*&}"

# remove everything from the end to the earliest blank
string="${string%% *}"

# ta da!
echo $string
&11111-&1111-&C00