Question

I’m looking for some help with a regular expression for a MYSQL query. I’m fairly new to expressions and have gotten myself thoroughly confused.

My database cell looks something like this

1314{{Here is some data}}1213{{More data here}}1112{{Data ahoy}}

And I’m trying to write an expression that’ll attempt to match the set of data, but only the data within the bracketed year.

For example, say that $year=1314 and $term=”ahoy”.

With the below REGEXP:

$year\{\{.* $term.*\}\}

It returns a match – because it’s matching the final “}}” of the 1112 prefixed dataset. I don’t want it to do this, but despite reading up on this greedy / negated business, I can’t get the syntax to work.
What would the best way to achieve what I’m after?

Answer 1

Try:

$year\{\{[^}]*$term[^}]*\}\}

Where [^}]* matches anything not a } so it will stop matching when it hits the first occurrence of }

.* is greedy so it will match the last occurrence possible so .*\}\} matches the last set of }} to make it non-greedy you can use a ? like .*?\}\} but I prefer using negation.