On Sat, 18 Jul 2009 04:40:01 -0700, Lori
wrote:

I'm not sure what you mean by "numbers that are part of other strings".
I thought that's what was wanted but i'm probably missing something.

Sorry. That statement was not clear.

What I meant is that your routine seems to return seven digits from substrings
that are longer.

NH1234567890 -- 4567890
45678901234 -- 8901234

I interpreted the OP's requirements to indicate that he wanted to extract the
first seven digit WORD; whereas your routines extract the first (or last) seven
consecutive digits, even if they are part of another word.

In the regex I presented, WORD is defined as a seven digit string of digits
surrounded by a non-word character. A non-word character is anything except a
digit, letter or underscore.

So, mine is somewhat flawed in that it would return seven digits if they were
prepended by, let us say, an asterisk or ampersand; but it would return
**MISSING** in the above instances.

But given &1234567*, mine would also return the seven digits. This could be
taken care of, if necessary, by defining word a bit differently.
--ron