Question

I have a small problem with one of my regular expressions.
My data fields are set up as follows:

<3 spaces>my first column<3 spaces>my second column<3 spaces>etc. 

My regular expression is

\s\s\s(.*?)\s\s\s

The issue I’m coming across is that the regex only matches every other column. That makes sense if regex is starting to be applied at the very end of the matching pattern not after the group definition – there is no set of three spaces for it to match at that point until the second column is reached.

How can I make this happen? My google-fu is failing me.

Answer 1

you should use look-around assertions in regexp

/(?<=\s\s\s)(.*?)(?=\s\s\s)/