Regex - extract substring with specific pattern

Question

I have a large string as shown below:

99/34 12/34 This text is 22.67 22/23 33/34 Second text is like is 22.67 55/66 45/54 Third text is like is 32.27

and so on. I am trying to form a regex expression to extract all the substrings that start with "two digits, slash, two digits, one whitespace, two digits, slash, two digits, any character any number of repetitions,one . literal and two digits" from the large string.

The regex I tried is \d{2}/\d{2}\s{1}.*\.\d{2}. But, this returns the a single string "99/34 12/34 This text is 22.67 22/23 33/34 Second text is like is 22.67 55/66 45/54 Third text is like is 32.27". I would like to get this extracted as

99/34 12/34 This text is 22.67

22/23 33/34 Second text is like is 22.67

55/66 45/54 Third text is like is 32.27

How would I do this? I am using C# (.NET 4.5)

read about lazy (or non-greedy, or reluctant) and greedy quantifiers. — Casimir et Hippolyte
– Casimir et Hippolyte, Commented Jan 31, 2016 at 0:55

Jens Meinecke · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-31 01:00:25Z

2

The problem lies in the greedy .* it will try to match as many characters as possible while still giving a match.

You can simply modify your regex thus

 \d{2}/\d{2}\s.*?\d{2}\.\d{2}

The ? after the * makes it not greedy and only consume (eat) as few characters as possible in order to find a match.

Note that I also changed \s{1} to \s as it was a single character to start with an qualifying it as exactly one does nothing but obfuscate the pattern.

answered Jan 31, 2016 at 1:00

Jens Meinecke

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