Any character except whitespace over 5 spaces long

Question

In the example below, a dialogue between two people I want to match only the interrogators text. (The text on the left)

Hello, how are you?                 I am fine.
What is your name?                  My name is Simon.
What does Simon say?                Put your hands on your head.

When I perform a regular expression individually on each line I want to extract

Hello, how are you?
What is your name?
What does Simon say?

However, I also want to allow for room for error in the questioning text allowing for up to 5 white spaces between words. The number of white space between the questioner and the answerer is always over 5 characters.

I have tried this

([^ ]| {0,5})*

but that captures the whole line

And this

[^( {0,5})]+

but I guess you can't use parenthesis in between brackets to evaluate the inner text first and specify that as a single character.

Any ideas are welcome, thanks :)

Answer 1

This does it:

^(.*?) {5,}

Answer 2

Why don't just use split instead of match?

str.split("\s{6,}")

Answer 3

Try capturing using this regular expression:

^(.*?) {5}

The *? is a non-greedy match, meaning that it will find the shortest match rather than the longest. This should give you what you need.

See it working online: rubular

Answer 4

(.*[^ ])[ ]{5}.*