Regex: matching up to the first occurrence of a character

Question

Hey, 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 the semicolon.

Answer 1

Try /[^;]*/

Google regex character classes for details.

Answer 2

/^[^;]*/

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.

Answer 3

Try /[^;]*/

That's a negating character class.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

Would;

/^(.*?);/

work?

The "?" is a lazy operator, so the regex grabs as little as possible before matching the ;.

Answer 6

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