String Search with Special Characters

Team,

I have reviewed quite a few posts on this subject but I must be missing something since I cannot get my string search working. If you can help I would be very thankful. Say we have the following:

Say I have a string that is built up as follows:

1. 1st character is >
2. 2nd-5th characters are ABCD
3. 6th character is a space
4. There are a variable number of alphanumerical characters (i.e. 0 through 9, a-z, A-Z) for the 7th slot etc.
5. #4 is followed by a period
6. There are again a variable number of alphanumerical characters (i.e. 0 through 9, a-z, A-Z)
7. The last character is a <

How would you set up the regexp syntax to dertermine the locations in your string where these cases happen?

Here are two sample strings:

S = '>ABCD 1010.01<';

S = '>ABCD 2345678.123<';

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

[Raouf Amara]

pat = '>ABCD \w*.\w*<';
str = 'whateveryouwant>ABCD 2345678.123<andmore>ABCD 1010.01<';

idx = regexp(str,pat)

Answer 2

[Stephen23]

You can use tokens to identify the specific substrings and get their locations:

>> S = '>ABCD 2345678.123<';
>> [T,X] = regexp(S,'>(ABCD)\s(\w+)\.(\w+)<','once','tokens','tokenExtents')
T = 
    'ABCD'
    '2345678'
    '123'
X =
    2    5
    7   13
   15   17

[dsmalenb]

Just out of curiosity, if the string included the " or ' characters, then how would you need to handle the string?

[Stephen23]

"...if the string included the " or ' characters, then how would you need to handle the string?"

What do you mean by "handle" ? It is not clear what your question relates to: how such as string should be defined, or how the regular expression should be written to also match strings which include single/double quotes ?

If your question was actually about how to detect/ignore single/double quotes when matcing the substrings, then please specify if you want to include them or ignore them in the output.