Regex troubleshooting

Question

I'm trying to extract the following data.

Sample dataset

name ID: john
name ID: peter

I want to be able to extract out peter using a regex.

I'm only able to get john using this regex - name ID:\s(.*?)\s

but is not able to extract only peter out.

You can omit the `\s` at the end and you don't have to make the dot non greedy `name ID:\s(.*)` See https://regex101.com/r/WosCwF/1 — The fourth bird, Nov 13 '21 at 10:30
It may be that this regex question has a duplicate somewhere, but it's not the one this question was closed against. — jessehouwing, Nov 13 '21 at 18:08

score -1 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 13 '21 at 10:42

If these are single line items, you could anchor the expressions to the line boundaries:

^ expression $

... will do that, so:

^name ID: (.*)$

Make sure your expression is using the Multi-Line flag. Since you haven't specified the language or regex library you're using, I'm not 100% sure what the syntax would be in your case.

For C# you can pass the RegexOptions.Multiline to the constructor of the regex. In JavaScript you use the /expression/m syntax to set this option. In some libraries you can add (?m:) to the start of the expression.

Regex troubleshooting

1 Answers1