Extracting part of a string after the nth occurrence of a character

Hello,

I have a cell array of string which looks like this:

cellArrayS = {'staticString1;staticString2;staticString3;1;nextString'; ... 'staticString1;staticString2;staticString3;2;nextString;nextString'; ... 'staticString1;staticString2;staticString3;3;nextString;nextString;nextString'; ... 'staticString1;staticString2;staticString3;4;nextString;;;;'; ... 'staticString1;staticString2;staticString3;5;nextString;nextString'};

I would like to extract all the characters after the 4th semi-column until the end of the string. The results would be as follow:

extractResults =
'nextString';
'nextString'; 'nextString';
'nextString'; 'nextString'; 'nextString';
'nextString';;;;
'nextString'; 'nextString';

I have tried looking at related example on this question, playing around with regexp, find and extractAfter but I didn’t manage to get anywhere.

Thank you very much.

Cecile

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

C = {...
'staticString1'';''staticString2'';''staticString3'';1;''nextString'';'
'staticString1'';''staticString2'';''staticString3'';2;''nextString'';''nextString'';'
'staticString1'';''staticString2'';''staticString3'';3;''nextString'';''nextString'';''nextString'';'
'staticString1'';''staticString2'';''staticString3'';4;''nextString'';;;;'
'staticString1'';''staticString2'';''staticString3'';5;''nextString'';''nextString'';'
};
T = regexp(C,'^(([^;]+;){4})(.*)$','once','tokens');
Z = cellfun(@(c)c{end},T,'uni',0);

giving:

>> Z{:}
ans = 'nextString';
ans = 'nextString';'nextString';
ans = 'nextString';'nextString';'nextString';
ans = 'nextString';;;;
ans = 'nextString';'nextString';

[Cecile]

Thank you very much, it works perfectly.

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

pattern = '^(?[^;]*;){4}';
extractResults = regexprep(CellArrayS, pattern, '', 'lineanchors')

[Cecile]

Thank you very much Walter. extractResults looks exactly like the original cellArrayS when I try your example above. I guess the pattern regular expresion needs to be edited? I am not able to read it unfortunately to see where the issue is. Would you be able to take another look? Thank you very much.