In this post I would like to present a solution to the practical problem of extracting a number of defined length from an alphanumeric string which may contain several numbers of varied lengths.
Indeed, the inspiration behind this post is in part derived from having personally witnessed many such requests on the various Excel forums, most of which involve the extraction of e.g. an account number of fixed length, 6 digits, say, from a longish string containing many other numbers.
As an example, given the following string:
20/04/15 - VAT Reg: 1234567: Please send 123456 against Order #98765, Customer Code A123XY, £125.00
we may wish to extract the one occurrence of a 6-digit number (123456) from that string.
