regex - How do I extract two center columns from a tab-delimited line of text? -

i need 2 regex regular expressions. 1 find second block of numbers , 1 find third block of numbers. data this:

8782910291827182    04  1988    081 

one code find 04 , other find 1988. have expression find first 16 numbers , last 3 numbers, stuck in finding 2 numbers of second , third section.

use field-splitting instead

based on corpus, seems 1 should able rely on existence of 4 fields separated tabs or other whitespace. splitting fields easier building , testing regex, i'd recommend skipping regex unless there edge cases not included in examples.

consider following ruby examples:

# split string fields. string = '8782910291827182    04  1988    081' fields = string.split /\s+/ #=> ["8782910291827182", "04", "1988", "081"]  # access members of field array. fields.first #=> "8782910291827182"  fields[1] #=> "04"  fields[2] #=> "1988"  # unpack array elements variables. field1, field2, field3, field4 = fields p field2, field3 #=> ["04", "1988"] 

a regular expression force spend more time on pattern matching, corpus grows more complex; string-splitting simpler, , enable focus more on result set. in cases, end results functionally similar, 1 more useful depend on you're trying do. it's have alternative options!