I've got a regular expression (javascript) which is something like...
/(x)(y)+(z)/gi
The problem is that I'll always get exactly 3 captures from those parens, even if the (y)+ matched multiple times. If it does match multiple times, it just returns the last match. I've no way of knowing ahead of time how many times y will match on any given run, but I want to capture all of them.
Any ideas?
I take it you can't use
/(x)((?:y)+)(z)/gi
because this is part of a "larger regex"?
Move the + inside of the parentheses and then split y into its individual parts. The following is Perl, but it should give you an idea:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $s = "abcbcbcd";
my ($x, $y, $z) = $s =~ /(a)((?:bc)+)(d)/;
my @y = $y =~ /(bc)/g;
print "x is $x\n",
"y is ", join(", ", @y), "\n",
"z is $z\n";
And here is some crappy Javascript I hacked together (I don't really know Javascript):
<html>
<body>
<script type="text/javascript">
var str = "abcbcbcd";
var matches = str.match(/(a)((?:bc)+)(d)/);
var x = matches[1];
var y = matches[2].match(/(bc)/g);
var z = matches[3];
document.write(
"x is ", x, "<br />",
"y is ", y.join(", "), "<br />",
"z is ", z
);
</script>
</body>
</html>
I would use
/(x)(y+)(z)/gi
then take the text that matched the second group and parse it further.