Delete everyting preceding and including a certain substring from variable

Question

In Bash, how can I delete characters from a variable until a certain substring?

Example:

ananas1kiwi2apple1banana2tree

shall look like this:

apple1banana2tree

The substring in this case is 2.

Answer 1

If you want to remove the substring upto 2, using bash parameter expansion:

${var#*2}

• # does non-greedy match from left, use ## for greediness

• #*2 matches and discards upto first 2 from variable var

Example:

$ var='ananas1kiwi2apple1banana2tree'
$ echo "${var#*2}"
apple1banana2tree

Answer 2

Using pure bash shell parameter expansion.

$ string="ananas1kiwi2apple1banana2tree"
$ newString="${string#*2}"
$ printf "%s\n" "$newString"
apple1banana2tree