Question

Position of a character in a string and Pattern Matching

Updated June 15, 2018

asked on June 5, 2018

Hi All

I need to save files to folders based on UserName.

File name is structured as UserName-scanned-timestamp. For Example file name may look like “jsmith-scanned-094315.pdf”.

How can I extract UserName out of file name given Username varies in length.

One thought is to first find the position of the “-“. Then select the string up to that length ( minus one to avoid getting “-“ ).

I am using Workflow and hoping to get this accomplished by using Pattern Matching.

Any suggestion on how to pattern matching and to select string up to a certain length?

Thanks

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Answer

SELECTED ANSWER

replied on June 5, 2018

Hi Naveed,

There are a few ways that you can write the pattern to pick up what you're looking for. I was able to use (\w+)- to get the username from that string. This pattern says to grab any word characters before the '-'. You will want to test this pattern with a few different usernames/documents, since some discrepancies in the username (like if there's spaces or punctuation) will not be picked up by this pattern. We also have a good help file on using regular expression with Workflow that you can always refer to.

Hope this helps!

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Replies

replied on June 15, 2018

Naveed,

I would use this pattern (\w+)\D.+

\w+ gets all word characters

\D gets non-digit character (usually symbols and the like)

.+ says get everything afterward regardless of what type of character it is.

Putting the \w+ in parentheses like this (\w+) says that is all you want returned from the pattern.

Here is what it looks like setting up a new token in Pattern Matching.

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