I need to extract a substring from a string; the substring is enclosed by ":" and ";". E.g.
:substring;
But with Lisp (SBCL), I'm having trouble extracting the substring. When I run:
(subseq "8.I:123;" : ;)
I get:
#<THREAD "main thread" RUNNING {1000510083}>:
illegal terminating character after a colon: #\
Stream: #<SYNONYM-STREAM :SYMBOL SB-SYS:*STDIN* {1000025923}>
Type HELP for debugger help, or (SB-EXT:EXIT) to exit from SBCL.
restarts (invokable by number or by possibly-abbreviated name):
0: [ABORT] Exit debugger, returning to top level.
(SB-IMPL::READ-TOKEN #<SYNONYM-STREAM :SYMBOL SB-SYS:*STDIN* {1000025923}> #\:)
I've tried preceding the colon and semicolon with \ but that throws a different error. Can anyone advise? Thanks in advance for the help!
As you can see in docs for subseq
, start
and end
are bounding index designators
and they can be either integer or nil
.
#\:
and #\;
are characters, so you can't use them, but you can use the function position
to find the first index of each character and use these indices as arguments for subseq
. You have to check that both indices exist and the second one is bigger than the first one:
(let* ((string "8.I:123;")
(pos1 (position #\: string))
(pos2 (position #\; string)))
(when (and pos1 pos2 (> pos2 pos1))
(subseq string
(1+ pos1)
pos2)))
=> "123"
This is a little bit cumbersome, so I suggest you to use some regex library. The following example was created with CL-PPCRE:
(load "~/quicklisp/setup.lisp")
(ql:quickload :cl-ppcre)
> (cl-ppcre:all-matches-as-strings "(?<=:)([^;]*)(?=;)" "8.I:123;:aa;")
("123" "aa")