Reputation: 574

Regex not stopping at first space

Trying to create a pattern that matches an opening bracket and gets everything between it and the next space it encounters. I thought \[.*\s would achieve that, but it gets everything from the first opening bracket on. How can I tell it to break at the next space?

Upvotes: 17

Answers (5)

user unknown

Reputation: 36229

\[[^\s]*\s

The .* is a greedy, and will eat everything, including spaces, until the last whitespace character. If you replace it with \S* or [^\s]*, it will match only a chunk of zero or more characters other than whitespace.

Masking the opening bracket might be needed. If you negate the \s with ^\s, the expression should eat everything except spaces, and then a space, which means up to the first space.

Upvotes: 23

vmpstr

Reputation: 5211

You want to replace . with [^\s], this would match "not space" instead of "anything" that . implies

Upvotes: 2

hochl

Reputation: 12920

I suggest using \[\S*(?=\s).

\[: Match a [ character.
\S*: Match 0 or more non-space characters.
(?=\s): Match a space character, but don't include it in the pattern. This feature is called a zero-width positive look-ahead assertion and makes sure you pattern only matches if it is followed by a space, so it won't match at the end of line.

You might get away with \[\S*\s if you don't care about groups and want to include the final space, but you would have to clarify exactly which patterns need matching and which should not.

Upvotes: 3