CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regex
hrishi1990
hrishi1990

Reputation: 345

Regex to match but not include a word before another word

I have two specific words in a line say dog and cat.

And say dog appears before cat.

How do I make a regex which tells me all the lines containing dog and cat, but show just the words after dog till cat, including cat, but NOT dog.

Upvotes: 6

Views: 1281

Answers (1)

zx81
zx81

Reputation: 41838

Option 1: Lookbehind

(?<=dog).*?cat

Details:

  • The (?<=dog) lookbehind asserts that what precedes the current position is dog
  • .*? lazily matches all characters up to...
  • cat matches literal characters

Option 2: \K (PCRE, Perl, Ruby 2+)

dog\K.*?cat

The \K tells the engine to drop what was matched so far from the final

Option 3: Capture Group (JavaScript and other engines that don't support the other two options)

dog(.*?cat)

The parentheses capture what you want to Group 1. You have to retrieve the match from Group 1 in your language.

Upvotes: 5

Related Questions