Question

I’m getting through adding delimiters to a large references file thanks to help from SO. Almost there now. I have a regex which I received from an SO member which allowed me to add the “|” between the author and year. I know need to add “|” between the article and publication. The rule I cam up with is that I want to add the “|” after the last period(dot) that precedes the “:” in the publication name. I tried editing my positive look ahead for this but it does not seem to work. I would appreciate your input on this as always. Thanks in advance.

Actually I probably don’t need even to specify the after 3 “|” rule. The main thing would be to match to the last period that precedes the “:”. Would that be correct. Even so my regex does not seem to be working.

^((?:[^|]+\|){3}.*?\.)(?=\:)

122| Ryan, T.N. |2002. |Some article name here. Publication name 2: 101-105.

Answer 1

Okay 2 problems:

• You forgot that there is stuff between the period and the colon for the lookahead! 🙂
• You did not have a greedy match before the period, so it was matching the first period instead of the last

Try:

'^((?:[^|]+\|){3}.*\.)(?=[^:]*?\:)'

See the difference? (Removed a ?, added a [^:]*)