Extract substring in Bash

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You can use Parameter Expansion to do this.

If a is constant, the following parameter expansion performs substring extraction:

b=${a:12:5}

where 12 is the offset (zero-based) and 5 is the length

If the underscores around the digits are the only ones in the input, you can strip off the prefix and suffix (respectively) in two steps:

tmp=${a#*_}   # remove prefix ending in "_"
b=${tmp%_*}   # remove suffix starting with "_"

If there are other underscores, it’s probably feasible anyway, albeit more tricky. If anyone knows how to perform both expansions in a single expression, I’d like to know too.

Both solutions presented are pure bash, with no process spawning involved, hence very fast.

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