Regular Expression to get all characters before -

Question

How can I get the string before the character  -  using regular expressions   For example  I have  text-1  and I want to return  text

User · Answer

This is something like the regular expression you need:

([^-]*)-

Quick tests in JavaScript:

/([^-]*)-/.exec('text-1')[1] // 'text'

/([^-]*)-/.exec('foo-bar-1')[1] // 'foo'

/([^-]*)-/.exec('-1')[1] // ''

/([^-]*)-/.exec('quux')[1] // explodes

User · Answer

Here is my suggestion - it s quite simple as that     -

User · Answer

Find all word and space characters up to and including a -     w   -

User · Answer

If you want use RegEx in  NET   Regex rx   new Regex       w     -      var match   rx Match  thisis-thefirst    var text   match Groups 1  Value  Assert AreEqual  thisis   text

User · Answer

So I see many possibilities to achieve this   string text    Foobar-test      Regex Match everything till the first  -   Match result   Regex Match text           -          match from the start of the string     match any character      zero or more times     but as less as possible        -  till the next character is a  -   this is a positive look ahead   Regex Match anything that is not a  -  from the start of the string  Match result2   Regex Match text       -           -   matches any character that is not a  -  zero or more times  Regex Match anything that is not a  -  from the start of the string till a  -   Match result21   Regex Match text        -   -      Will only match if there is a dash in the string  but the result is then found in capture group 1  Split on  -   string   result3   text Split  -      Result is an Array the part before the first  -  is the first item in the Array Substring till the first  -   string result4   text Substring 0  text IndexOf  -       Get the substring from text from the start till the first occurrence of  -   text IndexOf  -      You get then all the results  all the same  with this  Console WriteLine result   Console WriteLine result2   Console WriteLine result21 Groups 1    Console WriteLine result3 0    Console WriteLine result4     I would prefer the first method   You need to think also about the behavior  when there is no dash in the string  The fourth method will throw an exception in that case  because text IndexOf  -   will be -1  Method 1  and 2 1 will return nothing and method 2 and 3 will return the complete string

User · Answer

You could just use another non-regex based method  Someone gave the suggestion of using Substring  but you could also use Split   string testString    my-string   string   splitString   testString Split  -    string resultingString   splitString 0     my   See http   msdn microsoft com en-US library ms228388 28v VS 80 29 aspx for another good example

User · Answer

I dont think you need regex to achieve this  I would look at the SubString method along with the indexOf method  If you need more help  add a comment showing what you have attempted and I will offer more help

[c#] Regular Expression to get all characters before "-"

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