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 have a filename with x number of characters then a five digit sequence surrounded by a single underscore on either side then another set of x number of characters. I want to take the 5 digit number and put that into a variable.

I am very interested in the number of different ways that this can be accomplished.

Answer 1

In case someone wants more rigorous information, you can also search it in man bash like this

$ man bash [press return key]
/substring  [press return key]
[press "n" key]
[press "n" key]
[press "n" key]
[press "n" key]

Result:

${parameter:offset}
       ${parameter:offset:length}
              Substring Expansion.  Expands to  up  to  length  characters  of
              parameter  starting  at  the  character specified by offset.  If
              length is omitted, expands to the substring of parameter  start‐
              ing at the character specified by offset.  length and offset are
              arithmetic expressions (see ARITHMETIC  EVALUATION  below).   If
              offset  evaluates  to a number less than zero, the value is used
              as an offset from the end of the value of parameter.  Arithmetic
              expressions  starting  with  a - must be separated by whitespace
              from the preceding : to be distinguished from  the  Use  Default
              Values  expansion.   If  length  evaluates to a number less than
              zero, and parameter is not @ and not an indexed  or  associative
              array,  it is interpreted as an offset from the end of the value
              of parameter rather than a number of characters, and the  expan‐
              sion is the characters between the two offsets.  If parameter is
              @, the result is length positional parameters beginning at  off‐
              set.   If parameter is an indexed array name subscripted by @ or
              *, the result is the length members of the array beginning  with
              ${parameter[offset]}.   A  negative  offset is taken relative to
              one greater than the maximum index of the specified array.  Sub‐
              string  expansion applied to an associative array produces unde‐
              fined results.  Note that a negative offset  must  be  separated
              from  the  colon  by  at least one space to avoid being confused
              with the :- expansion.  Substring indexing is zero-based  unless
              the  positional  parameters are used, in which case the indexing
              starts at 1 by default.  If offset  is  0,  and  the  positional
              parameters are used, $0 is prefixed to the list.

Answer 2

similar to substr('abcdefg', 2-1, 3) in php:

echo 'abcdefg'|tail -c +2|head -c 3

Answer 3

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 4

If we focus in the concept of:
"A run of (one or several) digits"

We could use several external tools to extract the numbers.
We could quite easily erase all other characters, either sed or tr:

name='someletters_12345_moreleters.ext'

echo $name | sed 's/[^0-9]*//g'    # 12345
echo $name | tr -c -d 0-9          # 12345

But if $name contains several runs of numbers, the above will fail:

If "name=someletters_12345_moreleters_323_end.ext", then:

echo $name | sed 's/[^0-9]*//g'    # 12345323
echo $name | tr -c -d 0-9          # 12345323

We need to use regular expresions (regex).
To select only the first run (12345 not 323) in sed and perl:

echo $name | sed 's/[^0-9]*\([0-9]\{1,\}\).*$/\1/'
perl -e 'my $name='$name';my ($num)=$name=~/(\d+)/;print "$num\n";'

But we could as well do it directly in bash⁽¹⁾ :

regex=[^0-9]*([0-9]{1,}).*$; \
[[ $name =~ $regex ]] && echo ${BASH_REMATCH[1]}

This allows us to extract the FIRST run of digits of any length
surrounded by any other text/characters.

Note: regex=[^0-9]*([0-9]{5,5}).*$; will match only exactly 5 digit runs. :-)

⁽¹⁾: faster than calling an external tool for each short texts. Not faster than doing all processing inside sed or awk for large files.

Answer 5

Here's how i'd do it:

FN=someletters_12345_moreleters.ext
[[ $FN =~ _([[:digit:]]{5})_ ]] && NUM=${BASH_REMATCH[1]}

Note: the above is a regular expression and is restricted to your specific scenario of five digits surrounded by underscores. Change the regular expression if you need different matching.

Answer 6

A bash solution:

IFS="_" read -r x digs x <<<'someletters_12345_moreleters.ext'

This will clobber a variable called x. The var x could be changed to the var _.

input='someletters_12345_moreleters.ext'
IFS="_" read -r _ digs _ <<<"$input"