Regex to match the rest of string after the 4th character

Question

Here's the list of my random numbers

r7l5ndecvz9
0qb6rtxsd6ui
dj5iuzpq5vn
rysquf0jkek
435vw5h2qag

And what I want to do is to match or trim the rest after the number of characters (lets say 4), and I want to output as this:

r7l5
0qb6
dj5i
rysq
435v

See, I only want to match the rest of the characters after the 4th character. I tried this regex expression .{4}\b but it only matches the last 4 characters. I also tried this expression ^(\S\S\S\S) but it only matches the first 4 characters. I want to match the rest AFTER the 4th character. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

Given the sample inputs and outputs, you want to capture the first four characters. The regex for this is ^(.{4})

The caret matches the start of the line, the dot matches any character, the 4 in braces indicates 4 occurrences, and the parentheses capture the result for later access.

Here's working Python code:

import re
inputs = ['r7l5ndecvz9','0qb6rtxsd6ui','dj5iuzpq5vn','rysquf0jkek','435vw5h2qag']
for str in inputs:
    match = re.search('^(.{4})',str)
    print(match.group(0))