Regex for extracting Movie name from filename.

Question

Hi Guys,

imagine if you will the following string:

"A Great Movie (1999) DVDRip.avi"

I am looking to extract the string "A Great Movie" from this via regex, but struggling to get the correct regex for this.

I would be using this too parse file names of various length.

thanks!

Answer 1

Assuming the bracket is preceded by a space:

^(.+)\s\(.+

Answer 2

This syntax is designed around the .NET regex parser (may be different in other regex engines):

^(?<MovieName>.+)\((?<Year>\d+)\)(?<AdditionalText>[^\.]*)\.(?<Extension>[^\.]*)$

You can use this syntax to get out the data you want:

string line = "Movie Text";
Match match = Regex.Match(line);
match.Groups["MovieName"].Value;

You can also pull out the Year, AdditionalText, and Extension if you need it.

Answer 3

Matches everything up to the first bracket

^([^(]+)

Faster (marginally) than Ben's option

Python:

>>> import re
>>> re.compile("^([^(]+)").match("A Great Movie (1999) DVDRip.avi").groups()
('A Great Movie ',)