Regex to extract IP address from hyphenated string

Question

I have a string of text that contains an IP address with hyphens and words. I want to extract the IP address from it using a regular expression that also converts the hyphens to periods.

So to clarify, can the IP address be extracted and the hyphens be replaced with periods purely with a regular expression without using the regex in some code such as Java or Python:

What I have

ip-10-179-50-22.corp.dept.org.uk

What I want

10.179.50.22

I'm thinking that I need to extract 4 groups based on numbers and concatenate them with periods, but I have no idea how to do this or if this is even possible with only regex ?

What I've tried

(\d{2,3}-\d{2,3}-\d{2,3}-\d{2,3})

This gives me back 10-179-50-22 but I don't know how to replace on the matching group.

EDIT

I edited the question to clarify that I was trying to find a solution to find and replace with only a regular expression.

In summary, it looks like you can't just use a regex, but the regex needs to used with some code to achieve this

Answer 1

We don't know which language your using but a lot of them have a.replace() with which you could change - for. or event sub string with a bit of adjusting should work for your problem.

Answer 2

See regex101 example .

Regex:

.*\b(\d{2,3})-(\d{2,3})-(\d{2,3})-(\d{2,3})\b.*

Substitution:

\1.\2.\3.\4

Result:

10.179.50.22

Note that I am just using the regex you provided to match the IP address part, rather than a more accurate regex that would match any valid IP address.

Answer 3

If you are able to use the sed command, this regex would do the job. It uses 4 groups like you suggested.

sed -i 's/^ip-\([0-9]*\)-\([0-9]*\)-\([0-9]*\)-\([0-9]*\).*/\1.\2.\3.\4/g'

It replaces ip-10-179-50-22.corp.dept.org.uk with 10.179.50.22 . You can test it on https://sed.js.org .