Question

This is my first stack message. Hope you can help.

I have several strings i need to break up for use later. Here are a couple of examples of what i mean….

fred-064528-NEEDED  
frederic-84728957-NEEDED  
sam-028-NEEDED

As you can see above the string lengths vary greatly so regex i believe is the only way to achieve what i want. what i need is the rest of the string after the second hyphen (‘-‘).

i am very weak at regex so any help would be great.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Something like this. It will take anything (except line breaks) after the second ‘-‘ including the ‘-‘ sign.

var exp = @"^\w*-\w*-(.*)$";

var match = Regex.Match("frederic-84728957-NEE-DED", exp);

if (match.Success)
{
    var result = match.Groups[1]; //Result is NEE-DED

    Console.WriteLine(result);
}

EDIT: I answered another question which relates to this. Except, it asked for a LINQ solution and my answer was the following which I find pretty clear.

Pimp my LINQ: a learning exercise based upon another post

var result = String.Join("-", inputData.Split('-').Skip(2));

or

var result = inputData.Split('-').Skip(2).FirstOrDefault(); //If the last part is NEE-DED then only NEE is returned.

As mentioned in the other SO thread it is not the fastest way of doing this.