In this string:
#animal the cat #tree palm tree
I want to match
#animal
the cat
and
#tree
palm tree
I have found several ways to match the first one but I have problems stopping at the second # character and continue from there.
(?<=#)(\w*)\s(.*)(?!#)
finds only one match capturing everything after #animal until the end.
Lazyfiying the capturer next to the tag captures the tags
(?<=#)(\w*)\s(.*?)(?!#)
What am I missing?
You need
(#\w+)\s+(.*?)(?=#\w|$)
See the regex demo.
If there can be line breaks, you may replace . with [\s\S] / [\w\W] / [\d\D] / (?s:.*?) or just prepend the pattern with (?s).
Details:
(#\w+) - Group 1: a # char and then one or more word chars\s+ - one or more whitespaces(.*?) - Group 2: any zero or more chars other than line break chars as few as possible(?=#\w|$) - immediately to the right, there must be # and one or more word chars or end of string.