Question

I am using the PHP to run a regex on some strings.

The strings looks like:

somethingsomethin.somethingsomething.extension

I want to match the bits between the 2 periods and including the 2 periods part in the above:

.somethingsomething.

I came up with something simple like: \..+\.

The problem is that it matches all the periods in something like this:

somethingsomethin....somethingsomething....extension matches as ....somethingsomething.... when I only want .somethingsomething..

How can I get my regex expression to match as “1 unit” and to match only once?

Answer 1

Since . matches a ., exclude literal .s: \.[^.]+\. or possibly \.\w+\..