Question

im struggling with regular expressions in Javascript, they don’t seem to start at the beginning of the string. In a simple example bellow I want to get the file name and then everything after the first colon

 //string
 file.text:16:  lots of random text here with goes on for ages

 //regex
 (.?)[:](.*)

 // group 1 returns 't'

Answer 1

Try this regex:

/^([^:]+)[:](.*)/

Explaination:

^       #Start of string
(       #Start of capturing class #1
  [^:]    #Any character other than :
  +       #One or more of the previous character class
)       #End of capturing class #1
[:]     #One :
(.*)    #Any number of characters other than newline

The ? operator captures zero or one of the previous symbol only.

You could also use string operations instead:

str = "file.text:16:";
var n = str.indexOf(":");
var fileName = str.substr(0, n);
var everythingElse = str.substr(n);