Running regex from windows BATCH - regex

Question

I'm trying to use regex running from a batch
<zed>(.*?)<zed>
to find values I've stored in a file
<process>34593845387<process>
<zed>M567<zed>
<encode>UTF16<encode>
I'm able to do that from java not from batch

Answer 1

You'll probably have to use something like powershell, or another tool. The basics of what you can get in batch won't be enough. Once you do, you'll probably want a regex like:
<zed>([^<]+)<
That way if later the format changes a bit from:
<zed>234<zed>
to
<zed>234< /zed>
or something, it will still work. It's happened to me before :)

Answer 2

Findstr can technically use regex, but it's limited to character sets and can't handle capturing.
If your data looks exactly like that (nothing to the left of <zed>), you can tokenize the string using < and > as delimiters and store the value of <zed> as the second token in the string.
for /F "tokens=1,2 delims=<>" %%A in (data.txt) do if "%%A"=="zed" set zed_value=%%B"
You can then access the variable with %zed_value%. If you have multiple <zed> fields, the variable will contain the value of the last one.

Answer 3

Why not use cscript to access use Javascript regex?
type data.txt | cscript //nologo match.js "<zed>(.*)<zed>"
Where match.js is defined as:
if (WScript.Arguments.Count() !== 1) {
WScript.Echo("Syntax: match.js regex");
WScript.Quit(1);
}
var rx = new RegExp(WScript.Arguments(0), "i");
var matched = false;
while (!WScript.StdIn.AtEndOfStream) {
var str = WScript.StdIn.ReadLine();
if (str.match(rx)) {
WScript.Echo(str);
matched = true;
}
}
if (!matched) {
WScript.Quit(1);
}