I am trying to use regular expression to get all the characters from a line until a specific character occurs. For example, I have the following line: context-root1/*.jsv"/> I want to be able to just extract the word context-root1 (in other words, I want to be able to extract all the characters before the /). I am trying to do this in a batch file. The code I have so far which is relevnt for this is as follows: set finalvar=!myvar:~7,100! echo !finalvar! where the first line is looking at the string: <Uri AffinityCookie="JSESSIONID" AffinityURLIdentifier="jsessionid" Name="/contextroot1/*"/> and getting the string: contextroot1/*"/> I need to be able to make it just get the string contextroot1. So in other words get all the words before the first / occurs. I know that this would be possible with regular expressions, but not sure how it can be done. I know this should be easily done with regular expresions, but I do not have a lot of experience with them.

you can use vbscript Set objFS = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") strFile = "c:\test\file.txt" Set objFile = objFS.OpenTextFile(strFile) Do Until objFile.AtEndOfStream strLine = objFile.ReadLine If InStr(strLine,"AffinityCookie") > 0 Then s = Split(strLine,"Name="&""""&"/") ind = InStr(s(1),"/") WScript.Echo Mid(s(1),1,ind-1) End If Loop objFile.Close on command line C:\test>more file.txt <Uri AffinityCookie="JSESSIONID" AffinityURLIdentifier="jsessionid" Name="/contextroot1/*"/> C:\test>cscript /nologo test.vbs contextroot1 GNU win32 packages | Gawk

@echo off > newfile & setLocal EnableDelayedExpansion set str=context-root1/*.jsv"/> for /f "tokens=1 delims=/" %%a in ("!str!") do ( set newstr=%%a ) echo !newstr! ===================================== If at first you don't succeed, you're about average. M2