Question

I don’t know anything about regular expressions and I don’t really have the time to study them at the moment.

I have a string like this:

test (22/22/22)

I need to capture the test and the date 22/22/22 in an array.

the test string could also be a multiple words string:

test test(1) tes-t (22/22/22)

should capture test test(1) tes-t and 22/22/22

I have no idea how to get started on this. I managed to capture the date string with the parentheses by doing:

(\(.*)

but that really doesn’t get me anywhere.

Could someone help me out here and provide an explanation of how I should go about capturing this? I’m kinda lost.

Thanks

Answer 1

To explain the given regular expression : (.*)\(([^)]+)\)

(.*) will match anything, and capture it (the parenthesis capture what their inner expression matches)

\( is an escaped parenthesis. That’s what you’ll write when you wnat to capture a parenthesis.

[^)]+ means anything but a parenthesis (special characters must not be escaped within square brackets) one or more times.

([^)]+) captures what’s explained above

\) matches a closing parenthesis

So this regex will fail and capture the wrong strings if you have, say, a parenthesis in your first words like in :

test test(1) tes-t (22/22/22)

I’d recommend to think about what is the information you want to capture, and how do you spearate it from the rest of your string. This done,it will be much more easier to build an effective regular expression.