Search code examples
regexpcre

Regex: Capture any (dynamic) amount of lines

I've been trying to match the following:

First Group:Line1,
Line2,
..
LineX
Second Group:Some_Sample_text

With this query:

First Group:(?<first_group>.+\n*\n)Second Group:(?<second_group>.*)

My main goal is to capture any amount of lines between Line1 and LineX (because I can't anticipate how many there'll be), but since there's no option to match the end of files I'll probably need to use the "\n" tokens. I've also tried with IF and THEN statements but I just can't get it to work.

Any ideas appreciated.

Solution

  • Here, we might want to design an expression that'd just pass newlines, such as

    First Group:([\s\S]*)Second Group:(.*)
First Group:([\d\D]*)Second Group:(.*)
First Group:([\w\W]*)Second Group:(.*)

    Demo 1

    and we'd expand it to,

    First Group:([\s\S]*)Second Group:([\s\S]*)
First Group:([\d\D]*)Second Group:([\d\D]*)
First Group:([\w\W]*)Second Group:([\w\W]*)

    If our second group would have had multiple lines.

    Demo 2

    Advice

    The fourth bird advises that:

    You could make the charachter class non greedy to prevent over matching ([\s\S]*?)

    which then the expression would become, 

    First Group:([\s\S]*?)Second Group:([\s\S]*)

    for instance.

    Demo 3