Search code examples
regexregex-look-ahead

Regex that matches two or three words, but does no catpure the third if it is a specific word

I need to match a specific pattern but I'm unable to do it with regular expressions. I'm looking for people's name. It follows always the same patterns. Some combinations are:

  1. Mr. Snow
  2. Mr. John Snow
  3. Mr. John Snow (Winterfall of the nord lands)

My problem comes when sometimes I have things like: Mr. Snow and Ms. Stark. It captures also the and. So I'm looking for a regular expression that does not capture the second name only if it is and. Here I'm looking for ["Mr. Snow", "Ms. Stark"].

My best try is as follows:

(M[rs].\s\w+(?:\s[\w-]+)(?:\s\([^\)]*\))?).

Note that the second name is in a non-capturing group. Because I was thinking to use a negative look-ahead, but If I do that, the first word is not captured (because the entire name does not match), and I need that to be captured.

Any Ideas?

Here is some text to fast check.

Solution

  • Here is my two cents:

    \bM[rs]\.\h(\p{Lu}\p{Ll}+(?:[\h-]\p{Lu}\p{Ll}+)*)\b

    See an online demo

    • \b - A word-boundary;
    • M[rs]\.\h - Match Mr. or Ms. followed by a horizontal whitespace;
    • (\p{Lu}\p{Ll}+(?:[\h-]\p{Lu}\p{Ll}+)*) - A capture group with a nested non-capture group to match an uppercase letter followed by lowercase letters and 0+ 2nd names concatenated through whitespace or hyphen;
    • \b - A word-boundary.