Question

I want to scrape data from some text and dump it into an array. Consider the following text as example data:

| Example Data
| Title: This is a sample title
| Content: This is sample content
| Date: 12/21/2012

I am currently using the following regex to scrape the data that is specified after the ‘colon’ character:

/((?=:).+)/

Unfortunately this regex also grabs the colon and the space after the colon. How do I only grab the data?

Also, I’m not sure if I’m doing this right.. but it appears as though the outside parens causes a match to return an array. Is this the function of the parens?

EDIT: I’m using Rubular to test out my regex expressions

Answer 1

You could change it to:

/: (.+)/

and grab the contents of group 1. A lookbehind works too, though, and does just what you’re asking:

/(?<=: ).+/