Looking for a regex given a path/to/filename.ext I want to determine the topmost parent path.
examples: 'foo/bar/baz/file.ext' 'file2.ext' 'fooz/file3.ext'
should return 'foo' and 'fooz'
Language used is groovy.
In general, the proper way to extract components of a pathname is to use tools designed for just that; in the case of Groovy, that would be java.nio.file.Path
and @tim_yates's answer.
But the asker requested a regular-expression-based solution, so here is one:
pat = ~'^[^/]*(?=/)'
for (str in ['foo/bar/baz/file.ext', 'file2.ext', 'fooz/file3.ext']) {
print str + ': '
if (m = str =~ pat) {
println '"'+m[0]+'"'
} else {
println 'NONE'
}
}
Which outputs this:
foo/bar/baz/file.ext: "foo"
file2.ext: NONE
fooz/file3.ext: "fooz"
The pattern ^[^/]*
matches a (longest-possible) sequence of zero or more (*
) non-slash characters ([^/]
) starting at the beginning of the line (^
).
That would be enough by itself, except for the requirement that a string such as file2.ext
, with no slashes at all, not match. The lookahead assertion (?=/)
causes the pattern to match only if the matched text is followed by a slash.