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regexlanguage-agnostic

How to get the last 2 characters of a string with last character being A or B and second to the last character being 1-360? (REGEX GREP)

I'm not really using regex in a daily basis and I'm still new to this.

For example, I have these strings and this is the format of the strings:

APPLE20B50A
APPLE30A60B
APPLE12B5B
APPLE360A360B
APPLE56B

Basically, I want to get the last letter (A or B) and the digit before the last letter (or a digit after the letter/before the digit which is also A or B too). There are also a format like APPLE56B that doesn't have digit+letter in the middle.

Expected Output:

50A
60B
5B
360B
56B

I tried grep -o '.\{2\}$' but it only outputs the last 2 characters:

0A
0B
5B
0B
6B

and obviously, it's not dynamic for the digits. Any help would be appreciated.

Solution

  • grep -o would indeed work with the correct pattern

    grep -oP '[0-9]+[AB]$'

    With Perl,

    perl -nle'print $& if /[0-9]+[AB]$/'

    perl -nle'print for /([0-9]+[AB])$/'

    In all cases, you can provide the input via STDIN or by passing a file name to read as an argument.