Question

I’m trying to match a string like this:

key:value

But not match strings like these:

"has: stuff"
("or: that")

So far I’ve got a regex that looks like this:

^(.*?):

This is matching the all of these examples.
How can I prevent this?

Answer 1

In your counterexamples, what are the factors that make them “invalid” for the purposes of this match? Is it the punctuation at the start? The space after the colon?

It sounds like you should just include what you want, rather than trying to exclude what you don’t. If your key/value pairs always consist of alphanumeric keys (i.e. no punctuation), then you can use a regex that simply looks for that.

/^([[:alnum:]]+):/