Regular expression for middle of string

[Surreal]

Bit of background. I'm getting both text (can contain numbers) and data (only numbers) from serial. Since I don't know which I'm receiving and when it starts/ends, I'm making the sender send "textSTART###textSTOP" where "###" is what I want to extract. ### can contain text, numbers, new line, carrige return or whatever.

The same for data: "dataSTART###dataSTOP", where ### contains only numbers.

I think I should use Match Pattern, but I don't know how to make my regular expression.

Any help is appreciated. 

[Pataclaque]

What is your question exactly?

[Surreal]

What regular expression should I use with the Match Pattern VI to extract ### from a string like "testSTART###textSTOP" where ### can be anything from letters, numbers, and special characters like newline or carrige return?

[RavensFan]

What determines whether something is part of #### or a part of the other "text" that appears before STOP?

Can you also give a more specific example of what the data might look like?

[Surreal]

Sorry for being vague. "textSTART" and "textSTOP" is what I plan to mark my begging and end of the string I receive.

Example:

"textSTARTProgram Ready

Threshold: 127

Prescaler: 64

Baudrate: 115200textSTOP"

Other stuff I can receive would be data numbers for which I'll use a different Match Pattern VI. Example:

"dataSTART154613516846135156161dataSTOP"

Although the numbers will be in binary form. I'll figure that out later. 🙂

[Michel_Gauvin · Accepted solution]

There are many solutions if you only wants to extract the string between your specific delimiters. Here's one solution:

[mikeporter]

You might also want to try shorter delimiter string, easier and faster to parse.

Mike...

[altenbach]

If the string does not contain anything outside these "delimiters" and there are exactly two per string, you could simply use scan strings for tokens. You can also add the "dataSTART/STOP"  delimiters to the array to make it universal and look at the beginning of the raw string to determine if you are dealing with a "data" or "text" message.

Here's a quick draft.

[chembo]

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@Surreal wrote:
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I think I should use Match Pattern, but I don't know how to make my regular expression.

......

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Here is another solution based on regular expression match

[mikeporter]

Another thought is if you have that much control over how the data is formatted, you could even go with a standard format like json. Then the whole question of parsing goes away since you can convert json strings directly into LabVIEW native datatypes.

Mike...