I'm looking for help with a regex. I have the following UNC path \\server\share1\folder1 that I would like to grab server from. The server name will always be different and sometimes be an IP address.
I have the following Expression that I have been working with but I can't seem to get it to work the way I want.
\\?.*\\
This returns the following result \\server\share\. Can someone help me just grab server and not \\server\?
You can use this:
^\\\\.*?\\
^ is a beginning of line anchor and will match only at the beginning.
.*? is a modified version of .* so that it will match up to the match of the pattern following it; usually called to be matching 'as little as possible', in opposition to its 'greedy' counterpart.
Alternatively, you can use a negated class:
^\\\\[^\\]+\\
[^\\]+ matches any character except backslashes.
And if you want to get server without the backslashes, you should be able to use a capture group (by using parentheses) and extract the matched group (through $1 or \1):
^\\\\(.*?)\\
or
^\\\\([^\\]+)\\
Or if UNC finds any first match by default, then you can simply use [^\\]+.