Question

This is a sample piece from a huge file containing formula and bio code. Some lines starts with the following characters:

Sheep"-head`ed,   // followed by some normal words 
Mon`o*car*bon"ic,  // followed by some normal words 
mon`o*car"di*an,  // followed by some normal words 
Pol`y*chro"mate,   // followed by some normal words 
sheep"cot`,     // followed by some normal words 
baad,    // followed by some normal words 

I am new in regular expression. Now I am trying to use TPerlRegEx (a wrapper of PCRE library). I need to extract:

Sheep"-head`ed,   
Mon`o*car*bon"ic,  
mon`o*car"di*an,  
Pol`y*chro"mate,  
sheep"cot`,    
baad,   

Can you help me write a regular expression?

Many thanks.

Edit:

Thank all for help. If a normal is between them:

Sheep"-head`ed,   // followed by some normal words 
Mon`o*car*bon"ic,  // followed by some normal words 
New test,   //I do not want two or more than two words that end with comma.   
mon`o*car"di*an,  // followed by some normal words 
Pol`y*chro"mate,   // followed by some normal words 
sheep"cot`,     // followed by some normal words 
baad,    // I want this one word that ends with comma

I still want:

Sheep"-head`ed,   
Mon`o*car*bon"ic,  
mon`o*car"di*an,  
Pol`y*chro"mate,  
sheep"cot`,    
baad,   // I want this ONE word that ends with comma.

Thank you again.

Answer 1

The raw regex is ^[^,]+, regex in perl: /^[^,]+,/

• ^ matches beginning of line
• [^ ,]+ matches as many non-commas,non-spaces as possible.
• , matches the comma