Question

I have a regex which I’m using to match user functions inside an IDE (Sublime). This matches what I want (the function name itself), but it also matches the first parentheses. Therefore the match is like follows:

this._myFunction(‘content’);

Notice the opening paran.

Here is my expression:

(?:[^\._])?([\w-]+)(?:[\(]){1}

How can I exclude the opening paran from getting matched?

.

As a bonus question: How can I successfully not match the string: function, because as you can expect function( matches (not fun in JS).

Thank you to anyone who can assist.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, you cannot really use regex to parse any context-free grammar, but hopefully this can do better. It uses positive lookahead to not include the opening paren in the match but look for it anyways:

(?:[^\._])?([\w-]+)(?=[\(])

If your IDE’s regex engine supports negative lookbehind (the subexpression is not found before the match), you can avoid matching the string ‘function’ or “function”:

(?!<['"])(?:[^\._])?([\w-]+)(?=[\(])