regex: ignore eveything except the second column-CodePudding

I have a txt file with some text like this:

000001 - AAAAAA - BBBBBBBB - CCCC
000002 - BAAAAA - BBBBBBBB - CCCC
000003 - DAAAAA - BBBBBBBB - CCCC
...

I need a regex that ignore everything except the second colunm(AAAAAA,BAAAAA,DAAAAA,...)

Thank you

CodePudding user response：

Try this:

[^-] - ([^ -] ).*

[^-] matches up to the first non-dash and [^- ] matches up to the first character which is neither a space nor a dash.

With a tool like sed the command would be

sed -E 's/[^-] - ([^ -] ).*/\1/' input.txt

An even better tool for the job, however, is awk which will give the same result with the command

awk -F ' - ' '{ print $2 }' input.txt