Regular Expression: Match untill pattern is found

Question

Hi, I want to extract the status from the string untill I found a timespan. My input is something like "Something in start but not with this keyword of sure. STATUS: My Status Is Here Which can be anything but timespan 23:59:01 and so on. I want to extract the string after STATUS: untill 23:59:01 is found. How can i achieve this through regex. this 23:59:01 is a timespan and it is always in this format hh:mm:ss

Answer 1

Your specification is rather unclear, but you can try STATUS: (.*?) \d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}; this captures the portion that you want into group 1.

You may want to enable singleline if the . is to also match newline.

See also

• Above regex in action on rubular.com
  • (we can go back and forth on rubular if you need the pattern fine tuned further)

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In C#, you'd write something like this (see it on ideone.com):

Regex r = new Regex(@"STATUS: (.*?) \d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}", RegexOptions.Singleline);
foreach (Match match in r.Matches(text)) {
  Console.WriteLine("[[[" + match.Groups[1] + "]]]");
}

The RegexOptions.Singleline allows . to match any character, so it works when the desired string contains newlines.

References

• regular-expressions.info/Groups and Dot Matches (Almost) Any Character

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Why reluctant?

That's just in case you need multiple matches (as shown above). In the example below, there is only one A.*Z (with greedy).

---A--Z----A----Z---
   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
       A.*Z

Answer 2

Try this:

STATUS:[\sa-zA-Z]+?[:\d]{8}