[buug] regex question

[Nick Moffitt]

begin  johnd  quotation:
> Can someone give me a regex to find some text?
> 
> 
> I have a file with lines like this
> 
> aaaaaaaaaaaaUserID=123213&bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
> 
> 
> I need a regex to substitue on that gives me
> 
> the part after the = and before the &
> 
> in this case 123213
> 
> it is not for sure the the string will be numeric or alpha
> 
> I just know it is the text between UserID= and &

	If you're using a system that allows you to save references,
such as sed, Perl, or awk, you can wrap your answer in parens
(appropriately backwhacked for your implementation).

For example:

$ echo 'aaaaaaaaaaaaUserID=123213&bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb' | sed 's/^.*UserID=\([^&]\+\)\&.*$/\1/'
123213

Note that your backwhacks may vary, and Perl uses $1 instead of \1.

Apologies for the long line.

-- 

end