Extract substring in Bash

Question

Given a filename in the form someletters_12345_moreleters.ext, I want to extract the 5 digits and put them into a variable.

So to emphasize the point, I

Answer 1

I love sed's capability to deal with regex groups:

> var="someletters_12345_moreletters.ext"
> digits=$( echo $var | sed "s/.*_\([0-9]\+\).*/\1/p" -n )
> echo $digits
12345

A slightly more general option would be not to assume that you have an underscore _ marking the start of your digits sequence, hence for instance stripping off all non-numbers you get before your sequence: s/[^0-9]\+\([0-9]\+\).*/\1/p.

---

> man sed | grep s/regexp/replacement -A 2
s/regexp/replacement/
    Attempt to match regexp against the pattern space.  If successful, replace that portion matched with replacement.  The replacement may contain the special  character  &  to
    refer to that portion of the pattern space which matched, and the special escapes \1 through \9 to refer to the corresponding matching sub-expressions in the regexp.

---

More on this, in case you're not too confident with regexps:

• s is for _s_ubstitute
• [0-9]+ matches 1+ digits
• \1 links to the group n.1 of the regex output (group 0 is the whole match, group 1 is the match within parentheses in this case)
• p flag is for _p_rinting

All escapes \ are there to make sed's regexp processing work.

Answer 2

There's also the bash builtin 'expr' command:

INPUT="someletters_12345_moreleters.ext"  
SUBSTRING=`expr match "$INPUT" '.*_\([[:digit:]]*\)_.*' `  
echo $SUBSTRING

Answer 3

Inklusive end, similar to JS and Java implementations. Remove +1 if you do not desire this.

function substring() {
    local str="$1" start="${2}" end="${3}"
    
    if [[ "$start" == "" ]]; then start="0"; fi
    if [[ "$end"   == "" ]]; then end="${#str}"; fi
    
    local length="((${end}-${start}+1))"
    
    echo "${str:${start}:${length}}"
} 

Example:

    substring 01234 0
    01234
    substring 012345 0
    012345
    substring 012345 0 0
    0
    substring 012345 1 1
    1
    substring 012345 1 2
    12
    substring 012345 0 1
    01
    substring 012345 0 2
    012
    substring 012345 0 3
    0123
    substring 012345 0 4
    01234
    substring 012345 0 5
    012345

More example calls:

    substring 012345 0
    012345
    substring 012345 1
    12345
    substring 012345 2
    2345
    substring 012345 3
    345
    substring 012345 4
    45
    substring 012345 5
    5
    substring 012345 6
    
    substring 012345 3 5
    345
    substring 012345 3 4
    34
    substring 012345 2 4
    234
    substring 012345 1 3
    123

Answer 4

If x is constant, the following parameter expansion performs substring extraction:

b=${a:12:5}

where 12 is the offset (zero-based) and 5 is the length

If the underscores around the digits are the only ones in the input, you can strip off the prefix and suffix (respectively) in two steps:

tmp=${a#*_}   # remove prefix ending in "_"
b=${tmp%_*}   # remove suffix starting with "_"

If there are other underscores, it's probably feasible anyway, albeit more tricky. If anyone knows how to perform both expansions in a single expression, I'd like to know too.

Both solutions presented are pure bash, with no process spawning involved, hence very fast.

Answer 5

I'm surprised this pure bash solution didn't come up:

a="someletters_12345_moreleters.ext"
IFS="_"
set $a
echo $2
# prints 12345

You probably want to reset IFS to what value it was before, or unset IFS afterwards!

Answer 6

Without any sub-processes you can:

shopt -s extglob
front=${input%%_+([a-zA-Z]).*}
digits=${front##+([a-zA-Z])_}

A very small variant of this will also work in ksh93.