RegEx Help Needed

[danfinan]

Hi guys,

I'm a complete newbie when it comes to RegEx, but I was wondering if someone could please advise on how I could extract the name of the device from the following string?

"hostname"="iPhone"

The syslog I am using has every data point in the same format, I would like to make sure that Splunk correctly identifies the hostname each time. The built-in field extraction tool could recognise the term 'iPhone' but not something like 'DESKTOP-8HGF56' for example. I need it to be 100% every time so perhaps a regex term could let anything between "hostname"="xxxx" be extracted?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

[gcusello · Accepted solution]

Hi danfinan,
try this

| rex "\"hostname\"\=\"(?<device_name>[^\"]*)\""

you can test it at https://regex101.com/r/kQZJQe/1

Bye.
Giuseppe

[danfinan]

Giuseppe, you wonderful human - that worked perfectly, exactly what I was looking for. Thank you very much for your help, greatly appreciated!

[jpolvino]

Giuseppe uses a noteworthy tactic: matching on characters that are NOT something. In this case, matching on characters that are not double quotes. You may find that this is much more reliable that listing out the legal characters or character classes. I use this a lot and it has saved time by making the matching much more reliable.

[manuelostertag]

Indeed, this regex solution is the better one 🙂

[gcusello]

Hi danfinan,
if this answer satisfies your need, please accept and/or upvote it.
Bye and see next time.
Giuseppe

[manuelostertag]

Hi,

to "extract" the device name, please try this regex:

"\w.+"="(?P<device_name>.+)"

The value will be stored in device_name.

Here you can test the regex https://regex101.com/r/LNP0Ia/1