Regex - How to find words that start and end with a specific word

Question

I am writing a regex to find any instances of words that start with & and end with ;. There could be multiple copies on the same line, on different lines, or whatever. I just want to find anything that looks like

&

&dog;

&cat; and &dog;

or similar. I think my check for the ; is too greedy in my example. How do I fix my regex to find the specific words I need without selecting anything else?

@dasblinkenlight This is exactly what I needed. Works perfect. — ILikeTurtles, Feb 15 '18 at 16:20
This is not a duplicate of the question linked. I am selecting text nested between two delimiters. I am not dealing with selecting too much. The answer provided in the comments solves my issue. The other two answers appear to be applicable to the question you added as a duplicate. — ILikeTurtles, Feb 20 '18 at 16:45

anubhava · Answer 1 · 2018-02-15T16:22:05.853

1

This regex should work for you:

(?<=&)[^;&]+(?=;)

RegEx Demo

(?<=&): Lookbehind to assert previous position has &
[^;&]+: Match 1+ character that is not ; and not &
(?=;): Lookahead to assert next position has ;

Lookarounds just make sure that a matching text is surrounded by & and ;, if you want these markers also to be part of match then remove lookarounds and use:

&[^;&]+;

edited Feb 15 '18 at 16:22

answered Feb 15 '18 at 16:14

anubhava

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 15 '18 at 16:18

0

You might remove the lookaheads (?= and make the .* non greedy .*?

&.*?;

That would match:

ampersand &,
.*? any character zero or more times non greedy
a semicolon ;

answered Feb 15 '18 at 16:18

The fourth bird

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Regex - How to find words that start and end with a specific word

2 Answers2