Question

I have need to get the word between . and )

I am using this: \..*\)

But if there is more than one . I am getting the first . to ) instead of the last . to ).

E.g:

abc.def.ghi.jkl.mymodname(Object sender, CompletedEventArgs e)

I am getting :

def.ghi.jkl.mymodname(Object sender, CompletedEventArgs e)

I want:

mymodname(Object sender, CompletedEventArgs e)

Any pointers?
I’m new to regex, as you can see…

Answer 1

Be explicit. If you don’t want any dots between your starting dot and the closing parenthesis, you can specify this:

\.[^.]*\)

[^.] is a negated character class, meaning “any character except a dot”. That way, only non-dots are allowed to match after the dot.

And if you don’t want the leading dot to be a part of the match (but do want it to be present before the start of the match), you can use a lookbehind assertion:

(?<=\.)[^.]*\)

This works in nearly all regex engines except for JavaScript and Ruby (until version 1.8), both of which do not support lookbehind.