How to extract a substring near the Nth occurrence of a string or character in a string

A Scala substring example: I ran into a situation today where I wanted to get a string after the Nth occurrence of another string, in this case after the 6th occurrence of a “:” character. There are probably many ways to determine the Nth occurrence of a string in another string, but as a quick example, this is what I did.

First, I started with this string:

val s = """a:2:{s:3:"alt";s:35:"The Fairview Inn, Talkeetna, Alaska";s:5:"title";s:0:"";}"""

Within that string I wanted to extract the “The Fairview Inn, Talkeetna, Alaska” string. The way I approached this problem was to split the input string on the “:” character, giving me this:

scala> s.split(":")
res0: Array[String] = Array(a, 2, {s, 3, "alt";s, 35, "The Fairview Inn, Talkeetna, Alaska";s, 5, "title";s, 0, "";})

Then I saw that the substring I wanted was in the seventh position of the resulting array:

scala> s.split(":")(6)
res1: String = "The Fairview Inn, Talkeetna, Alaska";s

There are some extra junk characters on the end of that string, so I used dropRight:

scala> s.split(":")(6).dropRight(3)
res2: String = "The Fairview Inn, Talkeetna, Alaska

Then I noticed there was a double-quote at the beginning of the string, so I used drop on it:

scala> s.split(":")(6).drop(1).dropRight(3)
res3: String = The Fairview Inn, Talkeetna, Alaska

Of course there are other ways to solve this problem, but if you want to get a substring somewhere around the Nth occurrence of a string or character in another string, I hope this example is helpful.