Splunk Search

How to Capture optional fields?

JohnnyTsunami
New Member

rex command im using:  (?:\w+\s\:\s)(?<command>[^\;]+)?\;\s(?<Datainput>[^\s]+)\s\;\s(?<Extra>[^\s]+)

Data

1) command : TTY-unknown ; data ; ... ;
2) command : Random blurb ; TTY-unknown ; data ; ... ;
3) command : Some other blurb ; TTY-unknown ; data ; ... ;
4) command : TTY-unknown ; data ; ... ;
5) command : TTY-unknown ; data ; ... ;

When I rex this data, what i get is:

  command TTY datainput
1 unknown data ...
2 Random blurb unknown data
3 Some other blurb unknown data
4 unknown data ...
5 unknown data ...

What I want to get is data that doesn't skip the data in 2 and 3, so it would look like this.  How do I accomplish this?

  command TTY datainput
1   unknown data
2 Random blurb unknown data
3 Some other blurb unknown data
4   unknown data
5   unknown data
Labels (1)
Tags (1)
0 Karma

richgalloway
SplunkTrust
SplunkTrust

IME, when fields are optional it is much simpler to use multiple rex commands - one for each optional field, plus one or more others for the static fields.

---
If this reply helps you, Karma would be appreciated.
0 Karma
Got questions? Get answers!

Join the Splunk Community Slack to learn, troubleshoot, and make connections with fellow Splunk practitioners in real time!

Meet up IRL or virtually!

Join Splunk User Groups to connect and learn in-person by region or remotely by topic or industry.

Get Updates on the Splunk Community!

Quick connection discovery mode for forwarders

When a Splunk forwarder loses connectivity to its indexers, it does not always reconnect immediately. In many ...

Build and Launch AI Agents from Your Splunk Workflows

  Register We’ve all been there: juggling alerts, runbooks, and endless manual searches. What if you could ...

Splunk Cloud Application Management in Terraform

Register   On Tuesday, August 4 at 11AM PDT / 2PM EDT, we’re diving into how you can bring Infrastructure as ...