Replace everything between 2 characters?

[Tim Hallbauer]

Hi Clovertechers,

I need to replace all characters which appear between a “< " and a ":" yet maintain the data that follows after the ":".  I can get it to the point where it strips it out, but the data following is lost? regsub -all — {<.*:} $msgdata "" newMsg example

THX

Tim

Topic

[Daniel Lee]

Try this:

Code:

regsub -all — {<.*?:} $msgdata "" newMsg

I think the problem is the ‘*’ is a greedy search.  The way you had it the code would try to match from the very first ‘<' in the data to the very last ':' in the data.  I looks like you want a lazy search that when it finds the first '<' it will stop at the very first ':' it finds.  The '?' above will cause it to not do a lazy search instead of a greedy search.

[Keith McLeod]

Can a : be included in the data?

<abc:de: for example?

If not you may try something like

regsub -all — {<[^:]+:} $msgdata {} newMsg

Do you still want the <: in the newMsg?

If so you would need to add that back in…

Can you provide a more complete example?

[Tim Hallbauer]

Thanks, I tried Daniel’s suggestion and it worked like a charm. I was missing the “?” .

[Author]

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