I'm confused; what do you mean by "get the 005 or of this string" ? You want the output to look like: BUILD-AM-a or 005 ? I don't think sed is what you want. I believe this: echo BUILD-AM005-a | sed 's/.*\([[:digit:]]\).*/\1/g' Returns 5 because you are substituting everything before and after the digit with nothing. Are the strings the same length all the time? Would: echo BUILD-AM005-a | cut -c 9-11 do? If not then maybe: echo BUILD-AM005-a | grep -E -o [0-9]{1\,} John On Wed, 2007-05-09 at 14:52 -0500, Steve Moffat 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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