CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regex
Jerry
Jerry

Reputation: 60

Regular expression to find a same consecutive words

I'm a newbie to regular expressions and i have a problem in identifying the same consecutive words using regular expression. below is the scenario.

Here is the data : 

;af;aj;am;an;ao;ap12;aq123;ar;as;ad;af1223;

and my current regular expression is (;[a-z][a-z];) and it only matches the below sets ;af; , ;am; , ;ao; , ;ar; , ;ad; but my expectation is to match all these sets. ;af;aj;am;an;ao; & ;ar;as;ad;.

Could guys please guide me how to match these patterns?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 88

Answers (2)

vks
vks

Reputation: 67968

(;[a-z][a-z](?=;))

Try this.This returns the group you are looking for though its not clear how they are same.

The reason why urs was not working wass due to that fact (;[a-z][a-z];) doesnt leave a ; for the next element to start with.So it is not able to match as there is no ; in front of it.A lookahead assertion doesnt cosume ; thereby enabling all matches.

See demo.

http://regex101.com/r/tF4jD3/4

Upvotes: 0

Avinash Raj
Avinash Raj

Reputation: 174706

It seems like your trying to extract the substrings which are in this ;[a-z][a-z]; format. If yes, then you could simply put your regex inside a lookahead to do a overlapping match.

(?=(;[a-z][a-z];))

DEMO

Upvotes: 2

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