How to remove a small part of the string in the big string using RegExp

Question

Hey guys, I don't know RegExp yet. I know a lil about it but I'm not experience user.

Supposed that I run a RegExp match on a website, the matches are:

Data: Informations
Data: Liberty

Then I want to extract only Informations and Liberty, I don't want the Data: part.

Answer 1

Can't be absolutely sure without knowing more about the potential matches, but this should be at least a good starting point:

Data: (.*)$

That will return everything after "Data: " to the end of the line.

Answer 2

Search for a regular expression like

Data: (.*)

Then use the "first submatch", which is often referred to by "$1" or "\1", depending on the language you are using.

Answer 3

1. Does Data: always appear at the begining of a line?
2. Can there be multiple spaces between the : and the next word?
3. Do you know about groups?
4. What do you want: lazy matching vs greedy matching?

If so, you can use (with lazy matching):

^Data:\s+(.*?)$

With character classes:

^Data:\s+(\w+)$

if you know that it'll always be a word. Try this website.

Answer 4

Regular expression engines support what are commonly called "capturing groups". If you surround a pattern or part of a pattern with (), the part of the string matched by that part of the regular expression will be captured.

The command(s) you use to do the matching will determine how to get these captured values. They may be stored in special variables (eg: $1, $2) or you may be able to specify the names of the variables either embedded within the regular expression or as arguments to the regular expression command. Exactly how depends on what language you are using.

So, read up on the regexp commands for the language of your choice and look for the term "capturing groups" or maybe just "groups".