Suppose I have a string of this nature Set 1 (2) Set 2 (2) Set 3 (2) Set 4 (2) [Choose Two]. How can I make a regex that starts after (important that it's after or I can just add it back) every ) character and optionally ends at a ] character, so splitting the string would look something like this?
Set 1 (2) Set 2 (2) Set 3 (2) Set 4 (2) [Choose Two]
-> [Set 1 (2)], [Set 2 (2)], [Set 3 (2)], [Set 4 (2)]
There might be some empty characters and trailing whitespaces in the created array when using regex but I can remove that.
My current try is something like /\)(\s+).+(\]?)/gm but due to the .+ being greedy It goes all the way to the end for each match like so:
Set 1 (2) Set 2 (2) Set 3 (2) Set 4 (2) [Choose Two]
-> Set 1 (2{) Set 2 (2) Set 3 (2) Set 4 (2) [Choose Two]}
-> [Set 1 (2]
It also includes the ) when splitting which is undesirable.
Try:
(?<!\S).*?\)
\b.*\)
See an online demo
(?<!\S) = Negative lookbehind to assert position is not preceded by a non-whitespace char;.*?\) - 0+ (lazy) characters upto a literal closing paranthesis.The difference with the alternative \b.*\) is to use a word-boundary, but I'm not sure if that goes well with your actual data.
var s = 'Set 1 (2) Set 2 (2) Set 3 (2) Set 4 (2) [Choose Two]';
var m = s.match(/(?<!\S).*?\)/g);
console.log(m)const s = "Set 1 (2) Set 2 (2) Set 3 (2) Set 4 (2) [Choose Two]";
const m = s.match(/[^)]+(?:\))/g);
console.log(m)To handle the leading whitespace:
const s = "Set 1 (2) Set 2 (2) Set 3 (2) Set 4 (2) [Choose Two]";
const m = s.match(/(?<= |^)[^)]+(?:\))/g);
console.log(m)The simplest would be to use String.split with this regex:
/(?<=\))/g
It simply looks behind for a ) and then splits the text into an array.
However, you then need to remove the last item in the array (which will contain [Choose Two]).
Then you have array with each Set.
You can play with it here.