Forum Discussion

royd's avatar
royd
Regular Contributor
7 years ago

Regular Expression to extract a 'word' from string. Need help.

I am trying to extract success code from email message. I was able to do so with “aqString.SubString” method, thanks to Shankar R. I have been practicing Regular Expression and wanted to attempt extr...
  • royd's avatar
    royd
    7 years ago

    Okay, I have figured it out! Took a wild guess and it worked. The code below gave me what I was after.

     

     

    let msgBody = "Your AMG - Facility forms access code is 22RP3DPM. You will receive a link to your forms using your primary email address. You will need this access code to use the forms link. Further instructions will be available after using the access code to access the forms.";
let secCode = msgBody.match(/[0-9A-Z]{8}/); // the '/' before and after [0-9A-Z]{8} specifies it as Regular Expression

Log.Message("Security code is: " + secCode);

     

    Log reads as: "Security code is: 22RP3DPM"

     

    Hope this comes handy for someone else in my situation. :)

karkadil's avatar
karkadil
Valued Contributor

Using regular expressions for this particular case looks good because the word you want to extract contains numbers and its length is constant.

However, if you'd need to extract some other text (e.g. a person name from email body), regular expressions will not help you. In this case you can use a set of JScript methods split/join/slice. Here are 2 ways of how you can also extract the access code in your example:

 

// extracts 8 characters after "code is " substring
var code = s.split('access code is ')[1].slice(0, 8); 

// extracts a substring of any length between "code is " substring and next "." character
var code = s.split('access code is ')[1].split('.')[0];
tristaanogre's avatar
tristaanogre
Esteemed Contributor
7 years ago

Might even be easier than that.  I'm assuming that the text in question is a standardized format with the only variant being the security code.  If you "split" the string on the space character, it's the 8th word every time.

 

var code = s.split(' ')[7];
  • karkadil's avatar
    karkadil
    Valued Contributor
    7 years ago
    tristaanogre wrote:

     If you "split" the string on the space character, it's the 8th word every time.

     

    Well, its not that easy, because this solution returns code with a dot at the end :)

     

    • tristaanogre's avatar
      tristaanogre
      Esteemed Contributor
      7 years ago

      Touche. ;)

       

      Easily corrected with some judicial use of substring, etc.  Just a matter of trimming the extra... but all sorts of ways of manipulating strings to get the same result.  Personally, I dislike regular expressions and try with all my might to NOT have to use them... but that's just me. :)