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RegExTractor: Getting Started (Part 1)

In this tutorial I like to show you the main functionalities of RegExTractor. RegExTractor is build for complex searches. Keep in mind not to use RegExTractor if there is an easier way to accomplish your task!

You may download the latest release of RegExTractor on GitHub.

For this example we have a file folder containing some application log files:



These files look like this one here and we're interested in how often the application has been started.

Create a search term file

A search term file is a simple text file and as the name implies this file will contain all our search terms. In our simple example we will search for a single text term: "Application Started".

Search with RegExTractor


Now we open RegExTractor and choose the file folder which contains our example files. Decide if you like to search recursive in sub folders or if you like to search the top folder only. You may also apply a filter for files, if maybe just files with the extension *.log are in scope.



Next we choose the search term file we've created some moments ago. This search terms should apply to our search. Now we select a path and a file name for the xml file which RegExTractor should create as search result. Finally - we start the search! After search has finished we have a look at the xml file RegExTractor created:



In part 2 I will show a more complex use case using regular expressions and match groups to extract the start dates and start times of our example application.

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RegExTractor: Getting Started (Part 2)

In this post I will show how RegExTractor will use regular expressions as search terms. As seen in part 1 of this tutorial RegExTractors search result show us all findings of the provided search term "Application started". But this is not our goal. We'd like to know all dates and times when our application was started. RegExTractor supports regular expressions. It's assumed that you're familiar with regular expressions . The things we are interested in is the date, the time and the text "Application started". So we build our regular expressions using brackets to define our match groups. (\d{2}.\d{2}.\d{2} ) ( \d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2} ).+?( Application Started ) We create a search term file as described in part 1 using this more complex regular expression as search term instead of just the simple search string. The result looks like this: Doing the regular expression with .NET Framework functions the search will return the whole match of our regula

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