Regular expression using positive lookbehind not working in Alteryx

Question

I am trying to match a string the 2nd word after "Vores ref.:" using positive lookbehind. It works in online testers like https://regexr.com/, but my tool Alteryx dont allow quantifiers like + in a lookbehind.

"ABC This is an example Vores ref.: 23244-2234 LW782837673 Test 2324324"

(?<=Vores\sref.:\s\d+-\d+\s+)\w+ is correctly matching the LW78283767, on regexr.com but not in Alteryx.

How can I rewrite the lookahead expression by using quantifiers but still get what I want?

Answer 1

You can use a replacement approach here using

.*?\bVores\s+ref\.:\s+\d+-\d+\s+(\w+).*

Replace with $1.

See the regex demo.

Details:

• .*? - any 0+ chars other than line break chars, as few as possible
• \bVores - whole word Vores
• \s+ - one or more whitespaces
• ref\.: - ref.: substring
• \s+ - one or more whitespaces
• \d+-\d+ - one or more digits, - and one or more digits
• \s+ - one or more whitespaces
• (\w+) - Capturing group 1: one or more word chars.
• .* - any 0+ chars other than line break chars, as many as possible.

Answer 2

You can use a capture group instead.

Note to escape the dot \. to match it literally.

\bVores\sref\.:\s\d+-\d+\s+(\w+)

The pattern matches:

• \bVores\sref\.:\s\d+-\d+\s+ Your pattern turned into a match
• (\w+) Capture group 1, match 1+ word characters

Regex demo