value extraction from string

I am doing the number extraction of plate. There are two kinds of number plate, one is with pwd symbol other one without it. I am getting 8 characters are output. My expected output are 6 characters if there is no pwd symbol in the output else its 7 from right to left. I am using 'strfind' to check if pwddymbol is presented in the output.My sample output is 14184940 and 0PwDsymbol012345. How can i do this?

[Image Analyst]

What is the pwd symbol? To me pwd is a MATLAB and unix function that means "print working directory". Are you using the OCR capability of the Computer Vision System Toolbox? http://www.mathworks.com/help/vision/ref/ocr.html#bt548t1-2_1