[regex] Regular Expression with wildcards to match any character

I am new to regex and I am trying to come up with something that will match a text like below:

ABC: (z) jan 02 1999 \n

Notes:

• text will always begin with "ABC:"
• there may be zero, one or more spaces between ':' and (z).
• Variations of (z) also possible - (zz), (zzzzzz).. etc but always a non-digit character enclosed in "()"
• there may be zero,one or more spaces between (z) and jan
• jan could be jan, january, etc
• date couldbe in any format and may/may not contain other text as part of it so I would really like to know if there is a regex I can use to capture anything and everything that is found between '(z)' and '\n'

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thank you

Without knowing the exact regex implementation you're making use of, I can only give general advice. (The syntax I will be perl as that's what I know, some languages will require tweaking)

Looking at ABC: (z) jan 02 1999 \n

• The first thing to match is ABC: So using our regex is /ABC:/

• You say ABC is always at the start of the string so /^ABC/ will ensure that ABC is at the start of the string.

• You can match spaces with the \s (note the case) directive. With all directives you can match one or more with + (or 0 or more with *)

• You need to escape the usage of ( and ) as it's a reserved character. so \(\)

• You can match any non space or newline character with .

• You can match anything at all with .* but you need to be careful you're not too greedy and capture everything.

So in order to capture what you've asked. I would use /^ABC:\s*\(.+?\)\s*(.+)$/

Which I read as:

Begins with ABC:

May have some spaces

has (

has some characters

has )

may have some spaces

then capture everything until the end of the line (which is $).

I highly recommend keeping a copy of the following laying about http://www.cheatography.com/davechild/cheat-sheets/regular-expressions/

The following should work:

ABC: *\([a-zA-Z]+\) *(.+)

Explanation:

ABC:            # match literal characters 'ABC:'
 *              # zero or more spaces
\([a-zA-Z]+\)   # one or more letters inside of parentheses
 *              # zero or more spaces
(.+)            # capture one or more of any character (except newlines)

To get your desired grouping based on the comments below, you can use the following:

(ABC:) *(\([a-zA-Z]+\).+)

This should fulfill your requirements.

ABC:\s*(\(\D+\)\s*.*?)\\n

Here it is with some tests http://www.regexplanet.com/cookbook/ahJzfnJlZ2V4cGxhbmV0LWhyZHNyDgsSBlJlY2lwZRiEjiUM/index.html

Futher reading on regular expressions: http://www.regular-expressions.info/characters.html