Text Extractor

What does the Text Extractor do?

The Text Extractor isolates, matches, and extracts specific substrings and tokens from unformatted text, multiline logs, code files, and documents using a side-by-side dual-pane workspace. It supports extraction between start/end delimiters, custom regular expressions, column splitters, or built-in presets (Emails, URLs, IPv4 addresses, Numbers, and HTML tags).

Core Concepts

Understanding text extraction strategies:

• Delimiter-Based Extraction: Extracts substrings bounded by specified start and end markers (e.g. text between [ and ], or between quotes).
• Regular Expression Capture: Employs ECMAScript regular expressions to extract specific capture groups or entire regex matches.
• Built-in Presets: Pre-compiled regex patterns to extract common developer entities like RFC 5322 email addresses, HTTP(S) URLs, IPv4 addresses, and numbers.
• Column / Field Splitting: Extracts a specific 1-indexed field across multiline tabular logs or CSV/TSV data separated by custom delimiters.
• Deduplication & Formatting: Automatically removes duplicate matches and formats results as single-column lines, comma-separated lists, or JSON arrays.

How to use the tool?

1. Enter or Upload Source Text: Type or paste text into the left editor, upload a local file, or click Sample.
2. Configure Extraction Rules: Select an extraction mode (Delimiters, Regex, Presets, or Columns), set boundary characters or patterns, and select output formatting.
3. Inspect Extracted Items: Click Extract Text to view matched items in the right editor.
4. Copy or Export: Click Copy to copy the extracted results to your clipboard or Download to save as .txt or .json.

Context-Aware Practical Workflow Guides

Extracting Log Timestamps & IDs

• Set Start Delimiter to [ and End Delimiter to ] to extract all bracketed timestamps, severity levels, and thread names from server log streams.

Scraping URLs & Email Addresses

• Select Common Pattern Presets and choose URLs and Links or Email Addresses to aggregate contact information or API endpoints from raw text files.

Related Developer Utilities

• Text Diff Tool: Compare two text documents side-by-side with line and character diff highlighting.
• Prompt Variable Extractor: Detect and extract template placeholders ({{var}}, ${var}, <var>) with JSON Schema synthesis.
• Text Sorter: Sort text lists, logs, and strings alphabetically or numerically.
• Regex Generator: Build and test regular expression patterns interactively.

REST API Integration

blueutils.com provides a free REST API endpoint (POST https://blueutils.com/api/text/extractor) for programmatic text extraction.

API Request Parameters

API Request Payload Examples

cURL

curl -X POST https://blueutils.com/api/text/extractor \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "rawText": "[2026-08-25] [INFO] User alice logged in from 192.168.1.1",
    "mode": "delimiters",
    "startDelimiter": "[",
    "endDelimiter": "]"
  }'

Python

import requests

url = "https://blueutils.com/api/text/extractor"
payload = {
    "rawText": "[2026-08-25] [INFO] User alice logged in from 192.168.1.1",
    "mode": "delimiters",
    "startDelimiter": "[",
    "endDelimiter": "]"
}
headers = {"Content-Type": "application/json"}
response = requests.post(url, json=payload, headers=headers)
print(response.json())

Java

import java.net.URI;
import java.net.http.HttpClient;
import java.net.http.HttpRequest;
import java.net.http.HttpResponse;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        String jsonPayload = """
            {
                "rawText": "[2026-08-25] [INFO] User alice logged in from 192.168.1.1",
                "mode": "delimiters",
                "startDelimiter": "[",
                "endDelimiter": "]"
            }
            """;

        HttpClient client = HttpClient.newHttpClient();
        HttpRequest request = HttpRequest.newBuilder()
            .uri(URI.create("https://blueutils.com/api/text/extractor"))
            .header("Content-Type", "application/json")
            .POST(HttpRequest.BodyPublishers.ofString(jsonPayload))
            .build();

        HttpResponse<String> response = client.send(request, HttpResponse.BodyHandlers.ofString());
        System.out.println(response.body());
    }
}

API Response Parameters

API Response Payload Examples

Success Response (HTTP 200 OK)

{
  "isValid": true,
  "extractedItems": [
    "2026-08-25",
    "INFO"
  ],
  "extractedText": "2026-08-25\nINFO",
  "stats": {
    "totalFound": 2,
    "uniqueCount": 2,
    "linesProcessed": 1,
    "mode": "delimiters"
  }
}

Validation Failure Response (HTTP 400 Bad Request)

{
  "isValid": false,
  "error": "Text input cannot be empty."
}

Rate Limit Exceeded Response (HTTP 429 Too Many Requests)

{
  "error": "API rate limit exceeded. Please wait or contact support@blueutils.com."
}

Why use an API to extract text?

• ETL Data Pipelines: Isolate IDs, UUIDs, and foreign keys from unstructured log lines before warehouse loading.
• Log Processing Microservices: Ingest syslog streams and extract IP addresses, trace IDs, and HTTP status codes dynamically.

Native Usage

How to extract text locally in terminal environments:

Windows (PowerShell)

# Extract text between brackets in PowerShell
$text = "[2026-08-25] [INFO] User logged in"
[regex]::Matches($text, '\[(.*?)\]') | ForEach-Object { $_.Groups[1].Value }

Linux / Unix (Bash)

# Extract text between delimiters using grep and sed in Bash
echo "[2026-08-25] [INFO] User logged in" | grep -oP '\[\K[^\]]+'

Python

Using Python standard library:

import re

text = "[2026-08-25] [INFO] User alice logged in"
matches = re.findall(r'\[(.*?)\]', text)
print(matches)

Java

Using Java standard library:

import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;

public class TextExtract {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String input = "[2026-08-25] [INFO] User alice logged in";
        Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\[(.*?)\\]");
        Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(input);

        while (matcher.find()) {
            System.out.println(matcher.group(1));
        }
    }
}