I'd like to search for filenames that contain two hyphens (only). Some filenames have one hyphen, I just want the one's with two hyphens in the name:
THIS: some text - more text - yet more.txt
NOT THIS: some text - more text.txt
The hyphens are always surrounded by a space, FWIW.
I tried using (.*) - (.*) - (.*) and a couple variants, but the results aren't what I am looking for. I either get nothing or filenames with just one hyphen when I try various combinations.
I know this is an obvious one, but I have tried wading through regex tutorials concerning greedy, look aheads, etc. but can't for the life of me solve this. Can anyone help? I'm not looking for just the solution--I'd like to understand what I'm doing wrong in the regex syntax.
You can use this regex,
^[^-]*(?:-[^-]*){2}$
This when written in expanded form will look like this,
^[^-]*-[^-]*-[^-]*$
Which is how you wanted it, but I've compacted it by using quantifier to restrict the occurrence of hyphen to just two only.
If you want to extend your regex, just change .* to [^-]* to make your regex this, otherwise .* will match additional hyphens too leading to unexpected match results.
^([^-]*) - ([^-]*) - ([^-]*)$
Notice you should use start ^ and end $ anchors to make the filename match whole regex.