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I have been trying to learn Regular Expression today, and thought I was beginning to understand it when I ran into this problem. Any help would be appreciated.

My task is to grab the values for each ID from right hand side:

The results I want (in separate iterations) are


What I am doing right now is reading each ID line in a loop, then run the following code on each line:


But even though I specified ?: for the first set of (), I am still getting


Not only are the : = - included, a space is included as well, and I believe the new line characters too. I guess I am not too clear on what qualifies as a subpattern to be returned, and what are not?

2nd question is if there is a way for RegExMatch to return the RIGHT-most position of the match instead of the left-most? At least that way I can obtain my values via crude calculations and string functions.

Try %Result1%. You might not even need a loop if ids := RegExReplace(text, "ID.*?[:=\-]\s*|`n(?!ID).*?(?=$|`n)") works.

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Thanks much Titan; it seems the result I wanted was stored in Result1. Could you explain a bit on why this is? I understand RegExMatch can store multiple instances of values in an expandable array, although I only had 1 instance of value in the line, and do not understand why my RegExp would require more than 1 results to be created.

The ids expression you proposed appears to store the entire ID list in ids, although with all : and = and - removed. I will have to study it a little to understand why this is.

Thanks again for your help.

You need a lazy match, e.g. .*?

The result is stored in Result1 because:


Didn't you want that? If you remove the [:=\-]\s* part they should be left in.

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I don't understand your \R
If that's carriage return char, you must write it \r
A simple way to get what you want, if your IDs has no spaces inside, is just:
Badly written hasty test:

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vPhiLho := RegExReplace("Philippe Lhoste", "^(\w{3})\w*\s+\b(\w{3})\w*$", "$1$2")

Regular Expressions (RegEx) - Quick Reference:

OK I forgot it, and I just quickly skimmed the left side of the reference... And didn't found it in http://mushclient.com/pcre/pcrepattern.html which is probably obsolete now... The info is indeed in http://www.pcre.org/pcre.txt
Thanks for the reminder.

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vPhiLho := RegExReplace("Philippe Lhoste", "^(\w{3})\w*\s+\b(\w{3})\w*$", "$1$2")

Titan: Sorry, I must be going blind. Could you point me to where the lazy match .*? documentation is? Or was it .* that you meant? I don't seem to see how to make it return the right-most position though...

I took the subpattern explanation as meaning if I were processing ID1 and ID2 at the same time, then I would get the value for ID1 in Result1 and ID2 in Result2. Does the explanation instead mean that each () pair will cause a subpattern to be generated? How would I know if my results are not in Result2 or Result3?

Sorry, I made myself unclear; I wanted to obtain values like



Although your regexp seems to give me the value



by removing the : sign. I didn't check the rest of the array though; I will give that anoter try later today.



PhiLho: Your (much) simpler solution is working well, thank you. It would seem I have a long way to go before fully understanding Regular Expressions. I am wondering what if there are spaces or sometimes blank in the values? I am trying to make this regexp general purpose, so it can be used to obtain values other than IDs. The criteria I am thinking of is to grab any values after the : - or = signs, all the way till the end of the line. This is why I came up with (?::|-|=)\s(.*)\R. Would there be a better way to achieve this?



Thanks much to all who helped this newbie.

If you replace the \R with $, which is more traditional and portable, your expression is OK (as long as there is only one : - = in the line).
Another way:

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vPhiLho := RegExReplace("Philippe Lhoste", "^(\w{3})\w*\s+\b(\w{3})\w*$", "$1$2")

...1st I want to mention that using result1/match1 is the correct way to solve this, but the following code is only to demonstrate "why ?: (question-colon)/a non-capturing subpattern is capturing"...

1. The "overall match"..."match" contains any parts of the string that matched at all...including "non-capturing subpatterns" because the ?: only means it doesn't get its own "capture number" or "capture slot", but it's still included in the "overall match"
2. Zero-length assertions, aren't in the "overall match"

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