How to use regex when a substring is not unique?

Question

I have the following string

.....text .....person id: 2938 date of birth......text ....  
.....................person id: 238949 date of birth........
.......person id: 5555 date of birth..........................
...........person id: 232229 date of birth........

I need to get the substring that appears between the third occurence of the work person id and date of birth, i.e. 5555

How can I parse it?

where's your attempt?

Mitch Wheat
– Mitch Wheat

2013-10-12 03:31:08 +00:00
Commented Oct 12, 2013 at 3:31 — Mitch Wheat
– Mitch Wheat, Commented Oct 12, 2013 at 3:31

p.s.w.g · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-12 03:33:04Z

2

You could do something like this:

(?:person id:.*?){3}(\d+)\s+date of birth

This will match:

person id: followed by zero or more characters, non-greedily, repeated 3 times
one or more digits, captured in group 1
one or more whitespace characters
date of birth

Of course, if there are many such occurrences like this (say 6 such similar records) it will actually match the number every third occurrence of person id:.

answered Oct 12, 2013 at 3:33

p.s.w.g

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