Extract specific strings from text file

Question

From this file:

xxxxxxx; foo("this should be extracted 1"); bar("this should not be extracted"); yyyyyyy

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz foo("this should be extracted 2") uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

I want to get this:

this should be extracted 1

this should be extracted 2

I only managed to select the strings I want to extract using this regex: (?<=foo\(")(.*?)(?="\)). But I can't find a way to extract it or to delete all the unmarked text.

I put some x, y, z and u characters in the example just to show that in this file there are a lot of other things in the same line

Could somebody help me?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use ^(?:(?!foo\(\").)*$ to delete all lines not containing foo("

Then ^\r\n to remove empty lines

And then use ^.*foo\(\"(.*?)\"\).* to replace all with \1

Answer 2

• Ctrl+H
• Find what: (?:^|\G).*?foo\("(.+?)"\)(?:(?!\bfoo\().)*
• Replace with: $1
• check Wrap around
• check Regular expression
• UNCHECK . matches newline
• Replace all

Explanation:

(?:^|\G)            # beginning of line OR restart from last match position
.*?                 # 0 or more any character but newline, not greedy
foo\("              # literally
(.+?)               # group 1, 1 or more any character but newline not greedy, what to be extracted
"\)
(?:(?!\foo\().)*    # Tempered greedy token, make sure we haven't "foo" after

Replacement:

$1         # content of group 1, what to be extracted

Result for given example:

this should be extracted 1

this should be extracted 2

Screen capture: