Question

I am trying to come up with a simple regex that will look for the first ‘:’ followed by a unknow number of strings until a ‘.’ is found and return the string in between.

Example

test example:IWANTTHISBACK. [8909] test

Results

IWANTTHISBACK

Any help would be a great

Answer 1

Try this

(?<=:)([^\.]*?)(?=\.)

Explanation

<!--
(?<=:)([^\.]*?)(?=\.)

Options: case insensitive

Assert that the regex below can be matched, with the match ending at this position (positive lookbehind) «(?<=:)»
   Match the character “:” literally «:»
Match the regular expression below and capture its match into backreference number 1 «([^\.]*?)»
   Match any character that is NOT a . character «[^\.]*?»
      Between zero and unlimited times, as few times as possible, expanding as needed (lazy) «*?»
Assert that the regex below can be matched, starting at this position (positive lookahead) «(?=\.)»
   Match the character “.” literally «\.»
-->