Question

I have this regex /\[\w+:/

Which I use to let me detect when a user types [something: into a text field (could be [place: , [info: , [user: , etc…).

I’d like to extend the regex to match characters after the : but not beyond a space (and not include the space either). For example,

var str = "This is a [place:car a great place to go!";
var matchedStr = str.match(REGEX);

The matchedStr value should be [place:car.

Thanks!

Answer 1

\S matches anything that is not whitespace, so you could do \[\w+:\S+ to get your desired match. This includes not just regular space but newlines, tabs, etc too. (which is probably what you want)

You can also simply do a negative character class with a space in: \[\w+:[^ ]+ (which will include tabs/newlines/etc)