Get values within string with special characters

Hi all,

I have a column of strings such as these. My desired output will be two columns for each respective set of numbers

"

*58477$265#"

It's newline, new line and an asterisk. I am trying to get both sets of numbers (between *..$ and $..#). I could not get sscanf or extractAfter to work for this case. Any suggestions?

[Cris LaPierre]

The answer is going to necessarily be specific to your data. Please share your data by saving your variable to a mat file and attaching it to your post using the paperclip icon.

[per isakson]

"I have a column of strings such as these." Is that in a text file or a variable? In either case it can be done with regexp()

str = sprintf("\n\n*58477$265#");   % sample data
str = [str;str];
cac = regexp( str, '\n\n\*(\d+)\$(\d+)\#', 'tokens' );
cac{1}{:}

ans = 1×2 string array
    "58477"    "265"

(and possibly with textscan() or some newer text reading function)

[Walter Roberson]

str = sprintf("\n\n*58477$265#");   % sample data
str = [str;str];
parts = regexp(str, '\d+', 'match')

parts = 2×1 cell array
    {["58477"    "265"]}
    {["58477"    "265"]}

%in the special case where there are exactly two matches
vertcat(parts{:})

ans = 2×2 string array
    "58477"    "265"
    "58477"    "265"

[Walter Roberson]

Note: textscan() can only handle a string scalar or a character vector (not a character array), so it cannot directly be used in this situation, at least not without looping or arrayfun()... though you could potentially join() the strings to make one long string that you could process with textscan()

[per isakson]

One more hint

str = sprintf("\n\n*58477$265#");   % sample data
extractBetween( str, "*", "$" )

ans = "58477"

extractBetween( str, "$", "#" )

ans = "265"

and it's nothing wrong with loops if your column isn't HUGE and execution time becomes a problem.

Answer 1

[dpb]

str = sprintf("\n\n*58477$265#");   % sample data
str = [str;str];

Carrying on in the same vein with some of the newer stuff...

str2double(extract(str,digitsPattern))

ans = 2×2

58477 265 58477 265