RegEx: Find word after a letter but don't include the letter in the result.

Question

Here's a string that I may have:

(MyStringIsOneWholeWord *)

I have used the following javascript regular expression to get the text after the bracket if it starts with My.

/(^|\s|\()+My(\w+)/g,

The problem with this is that it includes the first bracket in the result, as that it is the letter/character that found it.

How would I get rid of the bracket in the result?

---

EDIT

For more information, I am editing the C Language javascript file of the SHJS syntax highlighter.

Here's all the relevant code for this question:

[
 /(^|\s|\()+My(\w+)/g,
 'sh_keyword',
 -1
]

Answer 1

If this was just JS you could use a capture group:

/(^|\s|\()+(My\w+)/g

Then get the match at that group. However, it appears that SHJS will use the entire match, requiring the use of lookbehind, which is not supported by Javascript's Regex engine.

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To get around this, I'd suggest you to read the documentation. This part here:

Once you have defined the language, you must convert it to the JavaScript format used by SHJS. You will require the sh2js.pl script from a source distribution of SHJS. The sh2js.pl script is written in Perl and requires the Parse::RecDescent module.

Tells me that the resulting JS files aren't meant to be edited. The docs say SHJS uses the same format as GNU Source-highlighting, which is specified here. So you should be editing the original .lang (link) files and then converting them to .js.

Answer 2

I don't understand what exactly you want to capture, but you can try some of these :

capture StringIsOneWholeWord in $1 :

/(?:^|\s|\()+My(\w+).*\)/

capture MyStringIsOneWholeWord in $1:

/(?:^|\s|\()+(My\w+).*\)/

capture MyStringIsOneWholeWord * in $1:

/(?:^|\s|\()+(My\w+.*)\)/

capture StringIsOneWholeWord * in $1:

/(?:^|\s|\()+My(\w+.*)\)/

Answer 3

What you want is a positive lookbehind assertion. Unfortunately, Javascript doesn't support them. However, Steven Levithan covers this in a blog post here: http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/archives/mimic-lookbehind-javascript