Regex positive lookahead multiple occurrence

Question

I have below sample string

abc,com;def,med;ghi,com;jkl,med

I have to grep the string which is coming before keyword ",com" (all occurrences)

Final result which is I am looking for is something like - abc,ghi

I have tried below positive lookahead regex -

[\s\S]*?(?=com)

But this is only fetching abc, not the ghi.

What modification do I need to make in above regex?

`\w+(?=,com)` matches [both](https://regex101.com/r/t2FXXQ/1). — Wiktor Stribiżew, Nov 22 '22 at 14:34
`[\s\S]` Matches any character which in this context is too much. You can also opt for a capture group `([^\s,;]+),com\b` See https://regex101.com/r/yUXluH/1 — The fourth bird, Nov 22 '22 at 14:39
Hi Fourth Bird, Thanks a lot for the suggestion. It worked :). — Abhishek, Nov 22 '22 at 14:56

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 22 '22 at 15:14

Using a character class [\s\S] can match any character and will also match the , and ;

What you can do is match non whitespace characters except for , and ; using a negated character class and that way you don't have to make it non greedy as well.

Then assert the ,com to the right (followed by a word boundary to prevent a partial word match)

Instead of using a lookahead, you might also use a capture group:

([^\s,;]+),com\b

See a regex demo with the capture group values.

Regex positive lookahead multiple occurrence

1 Answers1