Question

I’ve a regular expression problem, and I guess I’m missing a point in how the regex actually work.

I’ve some set of strings that contains methods definitions

• myMethod1()
• myMethod2(argument1 arg1)
• myMethod3(argument1 arg1, argument2 arg2)

but some of them also contains the output type:

• myOtherMethod1() : type1
• myOtherMethod2(argument1 arg1) : type2
• myOtherMethod3(argument1 arg1, argument2 arg2) : whatever

I want to only have inputs like the first ones: take out the output paramaters.
I’ve taken out my regex hat, and I come up with some conditional regex:

(?([:]+)(.+(?=\s:))|(.+))

If I match a “:” character in my string, I take whatever is before the ” :”, if not I take all.
Theoretically this is correct, but it returns the whole line
If I change the regex to

(?([:]*)(.+(?=\s:))|(.+))

Then the second type of methods are correctly regexed, but not the first ones (strange..).
Can you explain me where is my mistake?

Thank you very much,

Answer 1

There’s no need to handle it like this. Just take up to the first right parentheses you encounter:

/^[^)]*\)/

Unless I’m misunderstanding your problem…