Question

my RegEx is written here and it does not work no matter how I change it, substitute characters what not. I have a list of strings that may have 3 words or 8 words. Is there a easier way to cut off the RegEx when we hit a certain character or string? Let me show you what I mean:
Here are some examples of strings I will deal with:

WKT8100 Cooperative Education Work Term Preparation 15 hrs/w
CST8259 Web Programming Languages II 5 hrs/w
CST8265 Web Security Basics 5 hrs/w
CST8267 Ecommerce 4 hrs/w

I want to extract only the course name and ID from the string and leave out the number of hours I need, so leaving me with:

WKT8100 Cooperative Education Work Term Preparation

as a return.

My RegEx currently is like this:

RegEx = "/[a-zA-Z]{3}[0-9]{4}[A-Z]{0,1}\s[a-zA-Z]{3,20}\s[a-zA-Z]{0,20}\s[a-zA-Z]{0,20}\s[a-zA-Z]{0,20}\s/";

I a RegEx that extracts the hours correctly so maybe if there is a method I can use with substr. That way I can basically extract everything before the hours RegEx and don’t have to worry about a complex RegEx line.:

HoursRegEx = "@\s[0-9]{1,2}?\shrs\/w@i";

Answer 1

Why not:

/(.*) \d+ hrs\/w/

This should capture all characters before the x hrs/w part.

For a little more explanation, this just creates a capturing group that contains whatever it found before seeing: a space, one or more digits, another space, and then the sequence “hrs/w”. Since you don’t care what’s before the end part, why try to recognize it?