CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#regex
a1204773
a1204773

Reputation: 7043

Regex match order

From this possible input i want to mach the bold text:

Genre: Thriller, Adventure, Action, 2012

Genre: Thriller, Adventure, Action

I did something like this (?<=Genre: ).*(?=(, \d{4})?)

My problem is that I put this part (, \d{4})? hoping that because there is match ", 2012" it would stop at this point but it not, its just ignore the matching...

Any advice?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 342

Answers (1)

Jeff
Jeff

Reputation: 12785

.* is greedy, so it will consume anything it can. Since the last part with the digits is optional, it all gets consumed by the .*.

There may be a more eloquent way of doing it, but maybe just have two regexes:

(?<=Genre: ).*(?=(, \d{4}))|(?<=Genre: ).*

If I'm right the first will match in the case with the numbers, but it will fall through to the more general case if that fails.

Edit: Actually, it might work to do something like the following:

(?<=Genre: ).*?(?=(, \d{4})|$)

That way the .* is not greedy, but it must consume everything up to either the digits or else the end of the string.

Upvotes: 2

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