Question

I have a multi-line string like this:

"...Togo...Togo...Togo...ACTIVE..."

I want to get everything between the third ‘Togo’ and ‘ACTIVE’ and the remainder of the string. I am unable to create a regular expression that can do this. If I try something like

reg = "(Togo^[Togo]*?)(ACTIVE.*)"

nothing is captured (the first and last parentheses are needed for capturing groups).

Answer 1

This matches just the desired parts:

.*(Togo.*?)(ACTIVE.*)

The leading .* is greedy, so the following Togo matches at the last possible place. The captured part starts at the last Togo.

In your expression ^[Togo]*? doesn’t do the right thing. ^ tries to match the beginning of a line and [Togo] matches any of the characters T, o or g. Even [^Togo] wouldn’t work since this just matches any character that is not T, o or g.