Regex matching up to the first occurrence of a character

Question

I am looking for a pattern that matches everything until the first occurrence of a specific character  say a     - a semicolon   I wrote this              But it actually matches everything  including the semicolon  until the last occurrence of a semicolon

User · Answer

Really kinda sad that no one has given you the correct answer....

In regex, ? makes it non greedy. By default regex will match as much as it can (greedy)

Simply add a ? and it will be non-greedy and match as little as possible!

Good luck, hope that helps.

User · Answer

You need            The      is a character class  it matches everything but a semicolon   To cite the perlre manpage      You can specify a character class  by enclosing a list of characters in      which will match any character from the list  If the first character after the     is      the class matches any character not in the list    This should work in most regex dialects

User · Answer

The      says match anything except a semicolon   The square brackets are a set matching operator  it s essentially  match any character in this set of characters  the   at the start makes it an inverse match  so match anything not in this set

User · Answer

Try          Google regex character classes for details

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worked for me  to get only top  folders  from an array like   a     lt - this a b  c     lt - this c d   d e  f     lt - this

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This will match up to the first occurrence only in each string and will ignore subsequent occurrences

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Would               work   The   is a lazy operator  so the regex grabs as little as possible before matching the

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I found that               works well       being the  delimiter  here

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None of the proposed answers did work for me   e g  in notepad    But             did

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sample text     this is a test sentence  to prove this regex  that is g iven below    If for example we have the sample text above  the regex           will give you everything until the first occurence of semicolon      including the semicolon   this is a test sentence

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Try          That s a negating character class

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This was very helpful for me as I was trying to figure out how to match all the characters in an xml tag including attributes  I was running into the  matches everything to the end  problem with     lt simpleChoice   gt     but was able to resolve the issue with     lt simpleChoice   gt    gt     after reading this post  Thanks all

User · Answer

this is not a regex solution  but something simple enough for your problem description  Just split your string and get the first item from your array    str    match everything until first   blah   blah end     s   explode      str 2   print  s 0     output    php test php match everything until first

[regex] Regex: matching up to the first occurrence of a character

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