I'm trying to develop a regular expression that will match up to the first period in a sentence- so long as that period is not inside of any parentheses.
So, for example, the string:
Tom (Ed.) went down to the shop where the owners (J. Guys, A. Owner, and B. Ains) gathered. It was a great night.
Should return:
Tom (Ed.) went down to the shop where the owners (J. Guys, A. Owner, and B. Ains) gathered.
However, I find that using a lazy approach, I only get:
Tom (Ed.
And, using a greedy approach, obviously I get the whole sentence. Not all sentences are structured like this (some sentences have no parentheses, for example), and I've tried using negative lookup, but I don't particularly understand it.
Anyone have an idea on how to proceed?
You can use this regex in Java to match the period that is not inside the round brackets:
(?=([^(]*\([^)]*")*[^)]*$)\.
And to match the whole Tom (Ed.) went down to the shop where the owners (J. Guys, A. Owner, and B. Ains) gathered. sentence, you can use
.*?(?=([^(]*\([^)]*")*[^)]*$)\.
Have a look at a demo. Also, in Java, you will have to double-escape slashes:
String pattern = ".*?(?=([^(]*\\([^)]*")*[^)]*$)\\.";