Question

I’m having trouble coming up with an RegExKitLite expression that will match. I’m parsing a string and I want it to grab everything till it comes upon the first occurrence of a colon

What would be the expression in RegExKitLite to do that?

Thanks!

Answer 1

This regex will match everything from the start until (but excluding) the first colon:

^[^:]*

To include the first colon is as simple as putting it on the end:

^[^:]*:

So, to use either of those with RegexKitLite, you can do:

NSString * firstItem = [someString stringByMatching:@"^[^:]*" capture:0];

Note how there is no parentheses – since * is greedy you can simply use the negated class and use captured group 0 (i.e. the whole match).

It’s worth noting that most languages will include functions that allow you to do this with a regular function, for example ListFirst(MyString,':') or MyString.split(':')[0]

I suspect Objective-C has something similar to this … yep, see here

NSString *string = @"oop:ack:bork:greeble:ponies";
NSArray *chunks = [string componentsSeparatedByString: @":"];