I'm porting some Lua code to JS and I haven't worked with Lua so far.
There's the Lua pattern "^([^aeiouàèéêíòóôúïü]*)(.-)$" and I found the following explanation for the hyphen here:
- Match the previous character (or class) zero or more times, as few times as possible.
I'm trying to figure out what the equivalent as a regular expression would be. Also I don't understand why this is needed in the first place - wouldn't ending in (.*)$ suffice?
In Java, .- is actually equivalent of [\s\S]*? or (?s).*?, or - to play it safe - (?s:.*?), because . in Lua patterns matches any char (including line break chars) and - is the lazy (non-greedy) quantifier that matches 0 or more chars, i.e. *? in regular NFA regex.
See Lua patterns:
. all characters
And then
The
`+´modifier matches one or more characters of the original class. It will always get the longest sequence that matches the pattern.
The modifier`*´is similar to`+´, but it also accepts zero occurrences of characters of the class...
Like`*´, the modifier`-´also matches zero or more occurrences of characters of the original class. However, instead of matching the longest sequence, it matches the shortest one.
Actually, that pattern is pretty much equivalend to the corresponding regex in many languages. Javascript seems to not have the - quantifier, but you should be able to replace it with .* and it should still work.
Try "^([^aeiouàèéêíòóôúïü]*)(.*)$"
Of course, you can also test this in the Lua REPL:
Lua 5.3.5 Copyright (C) 1994-2018 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> orig = '^([^aeiou]*)(.-)$'
> modif = '^([^aeiou]*)(.*)$'
> ("jhljkhaaaasjkdf"):match(orig)
jhljkh aaaasjkdf
> ("jhljkhaaaasjkdf"):match(modif)
jhljkh aaaasjkdf
> -- QED