How Extract Last 4 characters of a string

Hi All,

I am looking to extract the last four characters of a short text variable and test these against the last four characters of another.

For Example:
Variable 1 - 1928387-1983
Variable 2 - 22228881768

I would want to extract 1983 from variable 1 and 1768 from variable 2 and test these values against each other to see if they match.

Any help would be much appreciated.

In your extract step, add a Converter Text Formatting Replace Pattern.

Your pattern will be to ignore everything except the last 4 characters in the string.  Both examples below will give the same results:

Pattern     .*(.{4})   Read as ignore everything except the last 4 repitions of any character.
Pattern     .*(....)     Read as ignore everything except the last 4 characters.

Note that you may need to trim spaces prior to your replace pattern step.

After you have extracted and applied the Replace Pattern Converter  you can use a Test Variables step.

Thanks JKing, Much appreciated.

Hi JKing,

I have a similar issue regarding data extraction where I need to extract two words from one string into two separate variables.

I am looking to extract the first word up until the first space into once variable and the last word starting from the last space into another.

Example1:

Variable 1: FirstName LastName
I would want to extract Firstname into a variable and LastName into another variable.


Example2:

Variable1: FirstName MiddleName LastName
I would want to extract Firstname into a variable and LastName into another variable ignoring MiddleName.

Thanks for your help

Names are a bit trickier to pattern out in that names do not always match a standard pattern.
A first name may be one character string or multiple character strings.  For instance, a first name could be Jim or Jon or Tom or Nancy, Ann, Beth, etc.
A first name could be Mary Elizabeth, Billy Bob, John Michael, BJ, KC, etc.
In a similar fashion, last names can be one continuous string, hyphenated, separated by a space or contain post-nominal initials (III, IV, JR, SR, MD, PhD, etc.).

Using Jim King as the name example:
The simplest pattern to extract everything up to the 1st space and ignore everything else is:  (.*)\s.*    results is Jim
The simplest pattern to extract the last name is .*\s   result is King

However, if the name is more complex, for example ROBERT B PARRAMORE-SMITH IV, then 
(.*)\s.*  results is ROBERT B PARRAMORE
.*\s       result is IV
Those would not be the results you would want.

A more complex pattern would return the correct last name:
^([A-z][A-Za-z]*\s+[A-Za-z]*)|([A-z][A-Za-z]*)$
Replace Expression:1   ROBERT B PARRAMORE-SMITH 
Replace Expression:2   PARRAMORE-SMITH IV
Replace Expression:3   PARRAMORE-SMITH
nb: the Replace Expression: 3 is key to this pattern working correctly!


A google search on Regular Expressions should result in several resources what include patterns for First Name and Last Name.  

Good luck with this.  Since names are inherently unstructured this is more difficult to do with your robot.


EDIT:

The is also the issue of pre-nominal titles: Dr, Fr, Sr, Mr, Mrs, Ms, etc., etc., etc.  These add additional levels of complexity.

Thanks for all your help with this issue.

Regards