Question

I have a text like this.

Mr John Smith , Mr James Smith                  +(21)-(21)-12345678, 12345678, 12345678                     +(21)-12345678, 12345678, 12345678        SomeTextHereAlso        +(21)-(22)-12345678                       www.somewebaddress.co.uk                            Some Title, Some Place , Some Town,Some Suburb,  City - 100000

I want to extract each of these strings using regex in javascript. I found some examples and this morning they worked. Now I don’t know why they don’t work any more.

To extract

Mr John Smith , Mr James Smith

I used this.

/\S(.*)\+/  and /\S(.*?)\+/

This didn’t work. I can’t figure out why.

To extract this

+(21)-(21)-12345678, 12345678, 12345678                     +(21)-12345678, 12345678, 12345678        SomeTextHereAlso        +(21)-(22)-12345678     

I used this.

/\+(.*)(?=www.)/

This did work.

And for url I used

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

And this works too.

The only problem is the first example that should extract all the characters until the first + but it extracts all the characters until the last +.

I checked on http://gskinner.com/RegExr/?2tr5t and the examples I showed here work. Are there any more similar examples that could help me since I looked into the code and didn’t find any error.

If regex is fine then how can I use IndexOf() method for this example to extract what I want?

Answer 1

You can try [^+]+ or more specifically ^[^+]+