regex to find year/month substring

Question

Can someone help me with a regular expression to get the year and month from a text string?

Here is an example text string:

http://www.domain.com/files/images/2012/02/filename.jpg

I'd like the regex to return 2012/02.

What software are you using? What have you tried? What don't you understand? — alexis, Mar 18 '12 at 14:00
don't know much about regex. Tried to read up on it but seemed very complicated to me. Was hoping someone here would help me out. — jens, Mar 18 '12 at 14:01
Alexis, I don't understand how regular expressions work. Looks like nonsense to me. I'm using php if that matters. — jens, Mar 18 '12 at 14:04
@jens - **Well worth the effort of learning them.** Super super useful tool. They **are** however slightly complicated to grasp at first. But like I said - it will pay off. — Lix, Mar 18 '12 at 18:33

Saeb Amini · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-18T18:18:10.260

2

This regex pattern would match what you need:

(?<=\/)\d{4}\/\d{2}(?=\/)

edited Mar 18 '12 at 18:18

answered Mar 18 '12 at 14:07

Saeb Amini

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Don't forget to escape the slashes `(?<=\/)\d{4}\/d{2}(?=\/)` – inhan Mar 18 '12 at 15:55
Thanks! Couldn't get it to work earlier but escaping solved it. – jens Mar 18 '12 at 19:16
Sorry, and I forgot the one for the decimal :) – inhan Mar 18 '12 at 22:09

Lix · Answer 2 · 2012-03-18T18:32:13.410

1

Depending on your situation and how much your strings vary - you might be able to dodge a bullet by simply using PHP's handy explode() function.

A simple demonstration - _{Dim the lights please...}

$str = 'http://www.domain.com/files/images/2012/02/filename.jpg';
print_r( explode("/",$str) );

Returns :

Array
(
    [0] => http:
    [1] =>
    [2] => www.domain.com
    [3] => files
    [4] => images
    [5] => 2012      // Jack
    [6] => 02        // Pot!
    [7] => filename.jpg
)

The explode() function (docs here), splits a string according to a "delimiter" that you provide it. In this example I have use the / (slash) character.

So you see - you can just grab the values at 5th and 6th index to get the date values.

edited Mar 18 '12 at 18:32

answered Mar 18 '12 at 18:26

Lix

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ahh, didn't think of that. I do like the regex solution better though. – jens Mar 18 '12 at 19:17
Me too :) Its pretty :) But this is an alternative - come back to this once you have [pulled all your hair out](http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/558021) over regular expressions ;) **JOKES** – Lix Mar 18 '12 at 19:20

regex to find year/month substring

2 Answers2