Other - Regular expression based on position

Hi,

I have a sample input file as follows, with columns Id,Name,Date,Description,Location(separated by ';')

220;John;10/12/2012;Working as a Professor in University;Hyderabad
221;Paul;15/08/2012;He is a Software engineer at MNC;Bangalore
222;Emma;25/01/2013;Working as a mechanical enginner;Chennai

Like this It contains 30 lines of data.
My requirement is to extract fields based on position and delimiter using regular expression in eclipse ide from the above text file.

For example : I want to extract all dates based on the position(3) in the text file, like that i want to extract all the descriptions(4)

What you have there is basically a CSV file, so you shouldn't require a regexp at all. You should be able to simply split each string using the semicolon as a delimeter (assuming a semicolon can't appear within any field).

Hi,

My requirement is to extract fields from a csv file. We have tried many regular expressions but they didn't exactly match with my requirement. I think we can write regular expression for csv file.
For Example I have tried with this regular expression (?>;).*(?>;)
it resulting all the three fields in the middle, excludes only first and last fields.
Can you suggest me how can i modify my regular expression to get only one field.

Which language are you using?

Code:

--Capture the 2nd column
^[[:space:][:alnum:]_]*;([[:space:][:alnum:]_]*);
--Capture the 3rd column
^[[:space:][:alnum:]_/]*;[[:space:][:alnum:]_/]*;([[:space:][:alnum:]_/]*)

and so forth.

It would be a lot easier to extract the info in a perl script.

Or with any language that includes a split/explode function. Or by pasting the file into a spreadsheet application (if it's only a one-off). I'm not convinced that a regexp is the right tool for this job.

Yes, I agree, a split function (or equivalent) would be the easiest. This is why I asked which language.