Question

I’m trying to do what should be a simple Regular Expression, where all I want to do is match the singular portion of a word whether or not it has an s on the end. So if I have the following words

test
tests

EDIT: Further examples, I need to this to be possible for many words not just those two

movie
movies
page
pages
time
times

For all of them I need to get the word without the s on the end but I can’t find a regular expression that will always grab the first bit without the s on the end and work for both cases.

I’ve tried the following:

([a-zA-Z]+)([s\b]{0,}) - This returns the full word as the first match in both cases
([a-zA-Z]+?)([s\b]{0,}) - This returns 3 different matching groups for both words
([a-zA-Z]+)([s]?) - This returns the full word as the first match in both cases
([a-zA-Z]+)(s\b) - This works for tests but doesn't match test at all
([a-zA-Z]+)(s\b)? - This returns the full word as the first match in both cases

I’ve been using http://gskinner.com/RegExr/ for trying out the different regex’s.

EDIT: This is for a sublime text snippet, which for those that don’t know a snippet in sublime text is a shortcut so that I can type say the name of my database and hit “run snippet” and it will turn it into something like:

$movies= $this->ci->db->get_where("movies", "");
if ($movies->num_rows()) {
    foreach ($movies->result() AS $movie) {

    }
}

All I need is to turn “movies” into “movie” and auto inserts it into the foreach loop.

Which means I can’t just do a find and replace on the text and I only need to take 60 – 70 words into account (it’s only running against my own tables, not every word in the english language).

Thanks!
– Tim

Answer 1

Ok I’ve found a solution:

([a-zA-Z]+?)(s\b|\b)

Works as desired, then you can simply use the first match as the unpluralized version of the word.

Thanks @Jahroy for helping me find it. I added this as answer for future surfers who just want a solution but please check out Jahroy’s comment for more in depth information.