asked on

String manipulation in DOS (Batch)

Sample data I have to work with:

abcd123, Joe Bloggs logging on to PC25 DOMAIN on <IP> on Thursday, November 2, 2006

What I want the output to look like:

Joe Bloggs - Thursday, November 2, 2006

This is the code I have at the moment (%* is input data):

set X=%*
set X=%X: on =      %
set X=%X: logging=      %
for /f "tokens=1,4 delims=      " %%i in ("%X%") do echo %%i - %%j

This is what my output then looks like:

abcd123, Joe Bloggs - Thursday, November 2, 2006

My question is, I can't work out how to get rid of the substring "abcd123, ".

Thanks,
Steve :)

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

callrs

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SOLUTION

SteveGTR

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sda100

ASKER

Both the above solutions work on the premise of a fixed number of tokens, which I can't guarantee. However, you gave me ideas for the solution, so I will share the points - thank you. If you're interested, here is the part of my code that achieves what I want:

if "%*"=="" goto :eof
set X= %*
set X=%X: on =      %
set X=%X: logging=      %
for /f "tokens=4 delims=      " %%i in ("%X%") do set Y=%%i
set Y=%Y:~0,-12%
for /f "tokens=1 delims=      " %%i in ("%X%") do set X=%%i
:logformat_loop
set X=%X:~1%
echo %X% | find "," > nul
if not errorlevel 1 goto logformat_loop
set X=%X:~1%

Steve :)