@ Schmalls:
Thank you so much for this!

@ Harish:
set test=BBB2100BBB
echo %test:~3,4%

Hi all,

I need ur help. Actually I m trying to read 1 text file and trying to get the substring from that.

my test.txt file c0ntatins
BBB2100BBB

my requirement to get the value 2100. Means the value between the BBB and BBB.
Please give me some solution asap.

Thanks in advance.

Awesome posts, thanks! Found it via Google after looking up “batch file sub string”. I didn’t realize that the windows shell had a built in substring function until I stumbled onto this page.

Thanks again.

And yet another thank-you – EnableDelayedExpansion just saved me hours of work!

Thank you very much for the post!

This is great stuff and exactly what I was looking for. I’ve been writing batch files for many years and never knew about this functionality. Thanks so must for posting it.

Thank you Schmalls. That EnableDelayedExpansion was just what I needed to trim 17 leading characters (of file path) out of a string.

Here is what I did to get the FOR variable:

SETLOCAL EnableDelayedExpansion
FOR /F %%F IN ("%FILELIST%") DO (
SET G=%%F
IF "!G:~-10,-3!" == "%KEYWORD%" (
:: Process one way...
) ELSE (
:: Process another way...
)
)

The EnableDelayedExpansion switch allows us to use variables in a loop with the ! syntax instead of the % syntax.

Substrings all very well on %VARIABLES%, but how do you take a substring of a FOR variable in a batch file? For example, the following code fails because the substring notation on “%%F” is not correct:

FOR /F %%F IN ("%FILELIST%") DO (
IF "%%F:~-10,-3%" == "%KEYWORD%" (
:: Process one way...
) ELSE (
:: Process another way...
)
)

How do you perform a substring operation on a FOR loop variable?