I have a field which may have alphanumeric values like this:





I need to get the numeric part to do some calculations and then assembly the alpha + numeric part again. Is there any cool .Net function that would help me on this process instead of me looping the value backwards to get only the numeric part of 1253 in the above example?

Edhy Rijo

Regex! It is a bit of a pain to learn, but it rocks at solving problems like this. You'd use a regex patterns to match parts of an input string.

This would match the first two examples.

([A-Z]*)-([0-9]*)

This would match the third example:

(0*)([0-9]*)

This would match the last example:

([A-Z]*) ([0-9]*)

This would match either of the first two or the last one:

([A-Z]*)(-| )([0-9]*)

Further, the parentheses are used to capture the matched text. Thus, in each of these examples you could then access the prefix separate from the suffix. I.e. with first pattern, and the input AMDNY-0001253 you could pull out AMDNY and 0001253 separately.



I highly recommend RegExBuddy as a tool to help figure the patterns out.



You then use the Regex object in .NET to work with this stuff:





Regex is a big subject, but hopefully this will get you started.

Whoops, code example got messed up because of less than/greater than signs:

Thanks Greg,



I will investigate RegEx even though in my case I don't have a constant delimiter like in sample 3 and I need to get just the numeric part to do the calculations and generate new numbers to be added to the alpha part. If I would have a delimiter I could use the String.Split() but I guess I will need to do a function to scan each character and test for IsNumeric() or Char.IsDigit() from right to left until an alpha is found then split the whole value.



It would be really cool if a RegEx expression could get it right.

Edhy Rijo