Regex - how to capture text in quotes within parentheses

Question

I am using http://www.rubular.com/ to test how much pattern matching will work. If I have text such as AND TO_CHARCREATE_TS, 'yyyymmdd' = '20140810' , the regex AND TO_CHARCREATE_TS, yyyymmdd = '(.*?)' allows me to extract the time stamp. However, when parenthesis are introduced such as AND (TO_CHAR(CREATE_TS, 'yyyymmdd') = '20140810') , I cannot get my regex AND (TO_CHAR(CREATE_TS, 'yyyymmdd') = '(.*?)' ) to extract the time stamp. Any help is appreciated

Answer 1

If the Parenthesis are in the actual string you are trying to match, they need to be escaped with '\\' for it to match.

AND \(TO_CHAR\(CREATE_TS, 'yyyymmdd'\) = '(.*?)'\)

Will match the example

AND (TO_CHAR(CREATE_TS, 'yyyymmdd') = '20140810')

Also, depending on what else is going on in the query that you are matching, you may be able to simplify the regex to grab just a quoted timestamp like this:

'(\d{8})'

Which will match any 8 digits inside of single-quotes