Question

How can I match the three words in the following string with a Perl compatible regular expression?

word1#$word2#$word3

I don’t know the actual words “word1, word2 and word3” in advance. I only know the separator, which is #$.

And I can’t use the word boundary as I have a multibyte encoding. This means for instance that the string can contain non-ASCII characters like umlauts which are not detected by the \w control character.

Answer 1

Try this regular expression:

/(\w+)#\$(\w+)#\$(\w+)/

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Edit   After your provided us with more information (see the comments to this answer):

/((?:[^#]+|#[^$])*)#\$((?:[^#]+|#[^$])*)#\$((?:[^#]+|#[^$])*)/