Question

I’m doing some filename scraping with VBS, if the file name was called

hello_world_2012_is_not the end of the world.pdf

then the regex should match the word “world” and nothing else.

I tried this:

[_][^_]+(?=_)

but it gets everything that is between two underscores. How do I only select the first occurrence?

Answer 1

I suggest the following regex:

/^[^_]*_([^_]*)_/

Explanation:

^        # Anchor the search to the start of the string
[^_]*    # Match any number of non-underscores, don't capture them
_        # Match the first underscore
([^_]*)  # Match any number of non-underscores, do capture them
_        # Match the second underscore.

Then the first capturing group ($1) will contain world, and the regex won’t match anywhere else in the string.