Use regular expressions to extract .llb filename from path

[Zedd]

I am trying to be clever (always a dangerous thing) and use a regular expression to extract the name of a library from a filepath converted to a string.   Whilst I appreciate there are other ways to do this, regex would appear to be a very powerful neat way, should I be able to get it to work.

i.e if I have a string of the type, C:\applications\versions\library.llb\toplevel.vi, I want to be able to extract library.llb from the string, given that it will be of variable length, may include numbers & spaces and may be within a file hierarchy of variable depth.   In other words, I want to extract the portion of the string between the last \ that ends with .llb

The best I have managed so far, is \\+.*llb which returned everything minus the drive letter and the toplevel.vi

Can anyone help me achieve this, or am i better using an alternative method (e.g filepath to array string, search for .llb)

Thanks

Matt

[MikeS81 · Accepted solution]

Hi Matt,

attached you'll find two other options.

Mike

Message Edited by MikeS81 on 04-13-2010 01:30 PM

[Zedd]

Thanks Mike.

I sometimes get distracted by trying to create 'elegant technical solutions' and fail to see what's staring me in the face.   Option 2 does the job nicely.

Thanks

Matt

[Omar_II]

Disclaimer: The solutions posted by MikeS81 are the preferred method to parse out file paths.

But I love a regular expression challenge.

Try

 [^\\]+\.llb

Omar

[Zedd]

Thanks Omar, that'll work nicely too.

I've never really played with regular expressions before, but they do look like a really poewrful tool, which is why I was trying them out here.   Got stuck by my lack of knowledge.   You wouldn't happen to know of a decent tutorial / book  that covers how to build these ?

Matt