Regex to extract nth token of a string separated by pipes

Question

I\'m new in Regex

I need to count and extract tokens from the below sample text:

AA||CCCCCCCC|||FFFFFFFFFFF

Requesting 4th token I mus

Answer 1

Splitting the string on | would be more effective, but this works too.

Code

We'll call the counter the number between curly brackets {X}. That counter begins at 0. If it's set to 0, we'll get the 1st element, if it's set to 5, we'll get the 6th element, etc.

See regex in use here

^(?:[^|]*\|){5}\K[^|]*

Alternatively, if \K isn't supported in your regex engine, you can use the following (result in the first capture group):

^(?:[^|]*\|){5}([^|]*)

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Explanation

• ^ Assert position at the start of the line
• (?:[^|]*\|){5} Match the following exactly 5 times
  • [^|]* Match any character except | any number of times
  • \| Match | literally
• \K Resets the starting point of the match. Any previously consumed characters are no longer included in the final match
• [^|]* Match any character except | any number of times

Answer 2

For DB2 please try this to get the 6th element in the list. This works on Oracle and allows for NULL list elements. The syntax for the REGEXP_SUBSTR call is the same so I suspect it will work:

regexp_substr('AA||CCCCCCCC|||FFFFFFFFFFF', '(.*?)(\||$)', 1, 6, 'c', 1)

EDIT: 'c' for case-sensitive