Ruby Group regular expression to match only first occurence

Asked Dec 17 '17 at 18:49

Active Dec 17 '17 at 18:49

Viewed 25 times

I am trying to extract a specific pattern from a string using a regular expression group. My pattern is

'*-to:' 'anything as a text but not an email' 'email'

eg.

send-to: Firstname Surname something@email.com

I am using

/(^.*-to:)(.*[^*@*])(\s[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4})/i

which works fine when the exact pattern is matched but if I get

send-to: Firstname Surname something@email.com somethingelse@email.com

it returns both mails which is not the desirable result. How I could get only the exact matches of this specific pattern?

asked Dec 17 '17 at 18:49

geoandri

1

Replace `.*` with `.*?`. – Wiktor Stribiżew Dec 17 '17 at 18:53
A good way to debug your regex is using regex101. https://regex101.com/r/aZDhJe/1 shows that your second test case isn't behaving as you would expect. https://regex101.com/r/aZDhJe/2 shows it working as you indicate is desired. – Shawn Mehan Dec 17 '17 at 18:54
1

@WiktorStribiżew it’s worth to mention that capturing emails with a regexp is a bad idea and that tld might be longer than 4 symbols nowadays. – Aleksei Matiushkin Dec 17 '17 at 18:55
Thanks for this @WiktorStribiżew . It works now. – geoandri Dec 17 '17 at 19:02

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