Trying to write a regex that can split title and author given the syntax:

Question

Editorial Team

Asked: June 9, 20262026-06-09T18:55:03+00:00 2026-06-09T18:55:03+00:00

Author Name – Title

The title can contain multiple “-“.

I have the following regex: ([^-]*) - (.*)

This works for most cases, e.g.

Douglas Adams - Life, The Universe & Everything

splits into Douglas Adams and Life, The Universe & Everything

but fails for double barrelled author names –
e.g. Ayize Jama-Everett - Some Book Title as I then get:

Author = Everett

So I want to change the exclusion group [^-] to exclude the group " - ", as hyphens in the name will not have spaces surrounding them.

How do I do this?

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Editorial Team · Answer 1 · 2026-06-09T18:55:04+00:00

Editorial Team

Looks like you need lazy quantifier:

(.*?) - (.*)

First group will get minimum number of symbols before -. The second will capture the rest. It’ll not match if there is no - in the string.

Depending of how you’re using it. You can also force it match with whole string by adding start and end quantifiers:

^(.*?) - (.*)$

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