Develop Reference

RegExp capturing non-match

I have a regex for a game that should match strings in the form of go [anything] or [cardinal direction], and capture either the [anything] or the [cardinal direction]. For example, the following would match:
go north
go foo
north
And the following would not match:
foo
go
I was able to do this using two separate regexes: /^(?:go (.+))$/ to match the first case, and /^(north|east|south|west)$/ to match the second case. I tried to combine the regexes to be /^(?:go (.+))|(north|east|south|west)$/. The regex matches all of my test cases correctly, but it doesn't correctly capture for the second case. I tried plugging the regex into RegExr and noticed that even though the first case wasn't being matched against, it was still being captured.
How can I correct this?

Try using the positive lookbehind feature to find the word "go".
(north|east|south|west|(?<=go ).+)$
Note that this solution prevents you from including ^ at the start of the regex, because the text "go" is not actually included in the group.

You have to move the closing parenthesis to the end of the pattern to have both patterns between anchors, or else you would allow a match before one of the cardinal directions and it would still capture the cardinal direction at the end of the string.
Then in the JavaScript you can check for the group 1 or group 2 value.
^(?:go (.+)|(north|east|south|west))$
^
Regex demo
Using a lookbehind assertion (if supported), you might also get a match only instead of capture groups.
In that case, you can match the rest of the line, asserting go to the left at the start of the string, or match only 1 of the cardinal directions:
(?<=^go ).+|^(?:north|east|south|west)$
Regex demo

How can I match the last part of an email via JavaScript? [duplicate]

Using a regular expression (replaceregexp in Ant) how can I match (and then replace) everything from the start of a line, up to and including the last occurrence of a slash?
What I need is to start with any of these:
../../replace_this/keep_this
../replace_this/replace_this/Keep_this
/../../replace_this/replace_this/Keep_this
and turn them into this:
what_I_addedKeep_this
It seems like it should be simple but I'm not getting it. I've made regular expressions that will identify the last slash and match from there to the end of the line, but what I need is one that will match everything from the start of a line until the last slash, so I can replace it all.
This is for an Ant build file that's reading a bunch of .txt files and transforming any links it finds in them. I just want to use replaceregexp, not variables or properties. If possible.

You can match this:
.*\/
and replace with your text.
DEMO

What you want to do is match greedily, the longest possible match of the pattern, it is default usually, but match till the last instance of '/'.
That would be something like this:
.*\/
Explanation:
. any character
* any and all characters after that (greedy)
\/ the slash escaped, this will stop at the **last** instance of '/'
You can see it in action here: http://regex101.com/r/pI4lR5

Option 1
Search: ^.*/
Replace: Empty string
Because the * quantifier is greedy, ^.*/ will match from the start of the line to the very last slash. So you can directly replace that with an empty string, and you are left with your desired text.
Option 2
Search: ^.*/(.*)
Replace: Group 1 (typically, the syntax would be $1 or \1, not sure about Ant)
Again, ^.*/ matches to the last slash. You then capture the end of the line to Group 1 with (.*), and replace the whole match with Group 1.
In my view, there's no reason to choose this option, but it's good to understand it.

Need help to find the right regex pattern to match

my RegEx is not working the way i think, it should.
[^a-zA-Z](\d+-)?OSM\d*(?![a-zA-Z])
I will use this regex in a javascript, to check if a string match with it.
Should match:
12345612-OSM34
12-OSM34
OSM56
7-OSM
OSM
Should not match:
-OSM
a-OSM
rOSMann
rOSMa
asdrOSMa
rOSM89
01-OSMann
OSMond
23OSM
45OSM678
One line, represents a string in my javascript.
https://www.regex101.com/r/xQ0zG1/3
The rules for matching:
match OSM if it stands alone
optional match if line starts with digit/s AND is followed by a -
optional match if line ends with digit/s
match all 3 above combined
no match if line starts with a character/word except OSM
no match if line end with chracter/word except OSM
I Hope someone can help.

You can use the following simplified pattern using anchors:
^(?:\d+-)?OSM\d*$
The flags needed (if matching multi-line paragraph) would be: g for global match and m for multi-line match, so that ^ and $ match the begin/end of each line.
EDIT
Changed the (\d+-) match to (?:\d+-) so that it doesn't group.

[^a-zA-Z](\d+-)?OSM\d*(?![a-zA-Z])
[^a-zA-Z] In regex, you specify what you want, not what you don't want. This piece of code says there must be one character that isn't a letter. I believe what you wanted to say is to match the start of a line. You don't need to specify that there's no letter, you're about to specify what there will be on the line anyway. The start of a regex is represented with ^ (outside of brackets). You'll have to use the m flag to make the regex multi-line.
(\d+-)? means one or more digits followed by a - character. The ? means this whole block isn't required. If you don't want foreign digits, you might want to use [0-9] instead, but it's not as important. This part of the code, you got right. However, if you don't need capture blocks, you could write (?:) instead of ().
\d*(?![a-zA-Z]) uses lookahead, but you almost never need to do that. Again, specifying what you don't want is a bad idea because then I could write OSMé and it would match because you didn't specify that é is forbidden. It's much simpler to specify what is allowed. In your case since you want to match line ends. So instead, you can write \d*$ which means zero or more digits followed by the end of the line.
/^(?:\d+-)?OSM\d*$/gm is the final result.

Javascript regex: how to not capture an optional string on the right side

For example /(www\.)?(.+)(\.com)?/.exec("www.something.com") will result with 'something.com' at index 1 of the resulting array. But what if we want to capture only 'something' in a capturing group?
Clarifications:
The above string is just for example - we dont want to assume anything about the suffix string (.com above). It could as well be orange.
Just this part can be solved in C# by matching from right to left (I dont know of a way of doing that in JS though) but that will end up having www. included then!
Sure, this problem as such is easily solvable mixing regex with other string methods like replace / substring. But is there a solution with only regex?

(?:www\.)?(.+?)(?:\.com|$)
This will give only something ingroups.Just make other groups non capturing.See demo.
https://regex101.com/r/rO0yD8/4

Just removing the last character (?) from the regex does the trick:
https://regex101.com/r/uR0iD2/1
The last ? allows a valid output without the (\.com) matching anything, so the (.+) can match all the characters after the www..
Another option is to replace the greedy quantifier +, which always tries to match as much characters as possible, with the +?, which tries to match as less characters as possible:
(www\.)?(.+?)(\.com)?$
https://regex101.com/r/oY7fE0/2
Note that it is necessary to force a match with the entire string through the end of line anchor ($).

If you only want to capture "something", use non-capturing groups for the other sections:
/(?:www\.)?(.+)(?:\.com)?/.exec("www.something.com")
The ?: denotes the groups as non-capturing.

silent group not working in javascript regex match()

I'm trying to extract (potentially hyphenated) words from a string that have been marked with a '#'.
So for example from the string
var s = '#moo, #baa and #moo-baa are writing an email to a#bc.de'
I would like to return
['#moo', '#baa', '#moo-baa']
To make sure I don't capture the email address, I check that the group is preceded by a white-space character OR the beginning of the line:
s.match(/(^|\s)#(\w+[-\w+]*)/g)
This seems to do the trick, but it also captures the spaces, which I don't want:
["#moo", " #baa", " #moo-baa"]
Silencing the grouping like this
s.match(/(?:^|\s)#(\w+[-\w+]*)/g)
doesn't seem to work, it returns the same result as before. I also tried the opposite, and checked that there's no \w or \S in front of the group, but that also excludes the beginning of the line. I know I could simply trim the spaces off, but I'd really like to get this working with just a single 'match' call.
Anybody have a suggestion what I'm doing wrong? Thanks a lot in advance!!
[edit]
I also just noticed: Why is it returning the '#' symbols as well?! I mean, it's what I want, but why is it doing that? They're outside of the group, aren't they?

As far as I know, the whole match is returned from String.match when using the "g" modifier. Because, with the modifier you are telling the function to match the whole expression instead of creating numbered matches from sub-expressions (groups). A global match does not return groups, instead the groups are the matches themselves.
In your case, the regular expression you were looking for might be this:
'#moo, #baa and #moo-baa are writing an email to a#bc.de'.match(/(?!\b)(#[\w\-]+)/g);
You are looking for every "#" symbol that doesn't follow a word boundary. So there is no need for silent groups.

If you don't want to capture the space, don't put the \s inside of the parentheses. Anything inside the parentheses will be returned as part of the capture group.