Well, ya... I guess I did the equivalent (though not so concise) method after sending the first email to roundtable...

echo APP-AM005-a | sed 's/[[:alpha:]]//g;s/[[:punct:]]//g'

I like the search inversion though Sean. Much cleaner!

So the problem I have is solved, thanks Sean. But why won't my original method work?
The [[:digit:]]* should have matched all the consecutive digits shouldn't it? And then the ( ) brackets should place the match into buffer 1.

Steve

IBM Global Services
sjm@ca.ibm.com
(204)792-3245

----- Forwarded by Steve Moffat/CanWest/IBM on 05/09/2007 04:08 PM -----

"Sean Walberg" <sean@ertw.com> Sent by: swalberg@gmail.com 05/09/2007 04:05 PM

To Steve Moffat/CanWest/IBM@IBMCA cc roundtable@muug.mb.ca Subject Re: [RndTbl] Oh great RE master

# echo BUILD-AM005-a | sed 's/[^0-9]//g'
005

Sean



On 5/9/07, Steve Moffat <Steve.Moffat@ca.ibm.com > wrote:

Hi All;
I've been trying to write a sed function to return only a numeric portion of a string, but can't seem to get it working.
The input is a single string of letters and numbers, with the numbers always consecutive.
For example: BUILD-AM005-a

I want to get the 005 out of this string.

echo BUILD-AM005-a | sed 's/.*\([[:digit:]]\).*/\1/g'

will return the digit 5. This is good!

So I add an asterisk to try to match multiple digits like:
echo BUILD-AM005-a | sed 's/.*\([[:digit:]]*\).*/\1/g'

and instead of returning 005, it doesn't match anything, so returns nothing.

Can any of you RE maters help me out?

Steve Moffat
IBM Global Services
sjm@ca.ibm.com
(204)792-3245

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