You have a string that holds a (syntactically) valid path to a file or folder on a Windows PC or network. If the path is a UNC path, then you want to extract the name of the network server and the share on the server that the path points to. For example, you want to extract server and share from \serversharefolderfile.ext.

^\\([a-z0-9_.$●-]+)\([a-z0-9_.$●-]+)

Extracting the network server and share from a string known to hold a valid path is easy, even if you don’t know whether the path is a UNC path. The path could be a relative path or use a drive letter.

UNC paths begin with two backslashes. Two consecutive backslashes are not allowed in Windows paths, except to begin a UNC path. Thus, if a known valid path begins with two backslashes, we know that the server and share name must follow.

The anchor ‹^› matches at the start of the string (Recipe 2.5). The fact that the caret also matches at embedded line breaks in Ruby doesn’t matter, because valid Windows paths don’t include line breaks. ‹\\› matches two literal backslashes. Since the backslash is a metacharacter in regular expressions, we have to escape a backslash with another backslash if we want to match it as a literal character. The first character class, ‹[a-z0-9_.$●-]+›, matches the name of the network server. The second one, after another literal backslash, matches the name of the share. We place both character classes between a pair of parentheses, which form a capturing group. That way you can get the server name alone from the first capturing group, and the share name alone from the second capturing group. The overall regex match will be \servershare.

Recipe 2.9 tells you all about capturing groups.

See Recipe 3.9 to learn how to retrieve text matched by capturing groups in your favorite programming language.

Follow Recipe 8.19 if you don’t know in advance that your string holds a valid Windows path.