topic Re: define and search on space delimited fields in Splunk Search

define and search on space delimited fields

TimInSplunkAcc — Sun, 24 Nov 2013 11:18:19 GMT

Hi,
I have the following data: (time x y word1 word2 )

20131116-162406.698 569 609 burbled his

20131116-162407.590 568 615 wood manxsome

20131116-162408.481 684 592 tumtum raths

20131116-162409.372 635 609 head his

20131116-162410.263 882 620 with tumtum

20131116-162411.154 489 608 sought took

20131116-162412.045 484 624 hand thought

20131116-162412.936 484 624 hand thought

20131116-162413.827 917 613 son long

20131116-162414.718 1162 552 wabe foe

20131116-162415.609 145 552 hand foe

20131116-162416.500 956 587 galumphing hand

20131116-162417.391 628 635 aflame head

...etc

splunk recognises the timestamp field but nothing else, so i am trying to identify the remaining fields, at search time, as Xpsn Ypsn prime sub

(nb. in the following regex epressions the '\' after each '(?<' is added to get this edit window to display properly and not in the splunk search line).

This works:

sourcetype=MouseTracker | rex (?<\Xpsn>\s\d+)+(?<\Ypsn>\s\d+)+(?<\prime>\s\w+)+(?<\sub>\s\w+) |top prime

This also works:

sourcetype=MouseTracker | rex (?<\Xpsn>\s\d+)+(?<\Ypsn>\s\d+)+(?<\prime>\s\w+)+(?<\sub>\s\w+) |table prime sub Xspn

However this does not work:

sourcetype=MouseTracker | rex (?<\Xpsn>\s\d+)+(?<\Ypsn>\s\d+)+(?<\prime>\s\w+)+(?<\sub>\s\w+) |search prime=hand |table prime sub

why? why cant search use the new fields when top, filter, table and others can??

This is not suitable:

sourcetype=MouseTracker hand | rex ... (etc) because it hits if 'hand' is first or second word.

sorry to be a ghastly newbie but this has me stumped.

Re: define and search on space delimited fields

chris — Sun, 24 Nov 2013 19:23:10 GMT

Hi,

This might be because you've included the whitespace character in your fields. Try your search with this regex:

sourcetype=MouseTracker | rex "\s(?<Xpsn>\d+)\s(?<Ypsn>\d+)\s(?<prime>\w+)\s(?<\sub>\w+)" |search prime="hand" |table prime sub

or alternatively you could search for prime=" hand" which is probably not what you want to do.

Re: define and search on space delimited fields

TimInSplunkAcc — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 18:13:07 GMT

thanks very much. That has sorted it.

Re: define and search on space delimited fields

chris — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 08:40:08 GMT

You're welcome

Re: define and search on space delimited fields

kristian_kolb — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 15:22:03 GMT

And to make it 'permanent', i.e. moving it from the query to a config file;

props.conf
[MouseTracker]
REPORT-blah = mouse_tracker_extractions

transforms.conf
[mouse_tracker_extractions]
DELIMS = " "
FIELDS = timestamp, Xpsn, Ypsn, prime, sub