Hi,

I'm having a hell of a time trying to figure out why this isn't working out for me. I've reduced the program to it's simplest useful part, and I'd like to know what exactly I'm doing incorrectly. I've tried variations on some parts, also with no luck. Any help is appreciated.

---test.bat---
for /f "usebackq tokens=3" %%g in (`findstr /r /c:"this is [0-9]* magic" test.txt`) do (
echo %g
)

pause
---end test.bat---

---test.txt---
abra kadabra
this is 88874 magic
last line
---end test.txt---

Hah! It's %%g.

Might as well make this post useful.

Let's say I don't know what "this " and "agic" are in the line "this is 88874 magic". How would I find the value of any number (88874 in this case) in this situation?

Replace your For with the following one where the /c switch is omitted from the FindStr command

for /f "tokens=3" %%g in ('findstr /r "this is [0-9]* magic" test.txt`) do echo %%g

as /c and /r are opposite directives.

Thanks for the help, but that makes it return false positives or nothing at all. I used /c: to make it search the string in one block (no "or" function), and I used /r to enable the use of regular expressions.

I tested the code I posted using your test file and it returned the correct result (i.e. 88874), so you have to specify better what is the target of your search and the context related.

I tested out your code again (modified with usebackq, as it is not on by default on my machine), and it worked just fine.

When I tested it beforehand, I just tried the findstr part and expected it to print only the lines of the file that matched the search string, but it might've printed the entire thing instead.

This was probably due to the fact that usebackq was not in the code, so it returned every line that had at least one token from the string.

Sorry for my ignorance, and thanks for the tip. :) I'll update my code right-away.