CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexgo
Sambhav Sharma
Sambhav Sharma

Reputation: 5860

Split/Delimit a string on the first space/colon using regex

I am trying to split a string using regex. For example:

12 13: 14: 15 => One-12, Two-13 , Three-14: 15

i am trying to use the following regex: 

^(?P< one>.*)\\s(?P< two>.*):\\s(?P< three>.*)$

So as I see it, "one" should be the value before first "space"(\s) and then until next colon(:) the value should be "two" and everything after that should be "three".

But the output I get is: One-12 13:, Two-14, Three-15

Note: This is Golang type of regex but I guess this is a general Regex problem. Kindly help me out with this one.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 516

Answers (1)

kbshimmyo
kbshimmyo

Reputation: 579

The problem could be that it's trying to do the longest match for the leftmost pattern. If that's the case, try changing your original

^(?P< one>.*)\\s(?P< two>.*):\\s(?P< three>.*)$

here......^

to not permit a colon among those characters - [^:] if like regular sed regexes. For safety's sake, if there may be more than two colons in a line, do that on the second part too.

^(?P<one>[^:]*)\\s(?P<two>[^:]*):\\s(?P<three>.*)$

Edit: That seems to make the difference according to this tester, after changing the \\s to just \s and removing the original spaces in the pattern names. Likewise here.

Upvotes: 2

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