Question

I’m having trouble with what seems like a simple regex capture. I’m using AutoIt’s stringRegExp() function.

The source string is:

1 U:\some text here\more text over here\06-17-2011\Folder 2\161804\abc9831\xyz10007569.JPG

I’m trying to capture “abc9831” and “161804”. The “abc” part can be “abc”, “def”, or “ghi”, followed by a string of digits. The “161804” can be replaced with any string of text. Everything is case insensitive. I’m currently using the following regex pattern:

(?i)\\\\.+\\\\((abc\d+)|(def\d+)|(ghi\d+))

But it’s only capturing the “abc9831” part. How do I pick up the text string preceding it?

Answer 1

When the regex below is used in AutoIt’s StringRegExp() function (using the flag “1” to return an array of matches), it returns 161804\abc9831. Is this what you’re wanting to return?

.*\\([^\\]+\\[a-z]{3}\d+)\\.*

Here’s an example you can run yourself:

#include <Array.au3>

$string = 'U:\some text here\more text over here\06-17-2011\Folder 2\161804\abc9831\xyz10007569.JPG'

$capture = StringRegExp($string,'.*\\([^\\]+\\[a-z]{3}\d+)\\.*',1)

_ArrayDisplay($capture)