Match specific string anywhere between characters

Question

I'm not looking to match everything between two characters, like in this question. I'm looking to match a specific phrase. For example:

cat {mouse ostrich dog ostrich} fish {ostrich} ostrich

I want to match the three 'ostrich' strings in the curly brackets, but not anything else. Is that possible?

Please show what you have done so far and where it fails. – Binarus Sep 23 '17 at 09:08 — Binarus, Sep 23 '17 at 09:08

score -2 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 23 '17 at 09:08

If your engine supports \G (PCRE, ...) you could very well get along with

(?:\G(?!\A)|{) # match the start of the last match or {
[^{}]*?\K      # not { or } lazily, \K "forgets" the match thus far
ostrich        # ostrich literally

See a demo on regex101.com.

Match specific string anywhere between characters

1 Answers1