Multiple regex lookbehind

Question

I am searching for a string which has several occurrences of other string/char before it:

this is not real example, but it describes what I want to capture - string that occurs right after second (or third, the expression must be scalable and configurable) occurrence of the ":" character.

boo+foo:qoo+loo:thisIsWhatIneed...

Obviously, the following did not work:

(?<=\:){2,}.*

and this would be pretty much opposite (inverted) of what I want:

.*:.*:

Answer 1

This will match what you needed from your example:

[^:]*:[^:]*:(.*)

ignored:ignored:captured as group 1

This will let you specify the number of colon delimited words to ignore more easily:

(?:[^:]*:){2}(.*)

This will capture everything after the last colon until the end, regardless of how many colons there are:

:([^:]*)$