regex: match everything, but not a certain string including white sapce (regular expression, inspite of, anything but, VBA visual basic)

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Folks, there are already billions of questions on "regex: match everything, but not ...", but non seems to fit my simple question.

A simple string: "1 Rome, 2 London, 3 Wembley Stadium" and I want to match just "1 Rome, 2 London, 3 Wembley Stadium", in order to extract only the names but not the ranks ("Rome, London, Wembley Stadium").

Using a regex tester (https://extendsclass.com/regex-tester.html), I can simply match the opposite by:

([0-9]+\s*) and it gives me:

"1 Rome, 2 London, 3 Wembley Stadium".

But how to reverse it? I tried something like:

[^0-9 |;]+[^0-9 |;], but it also excludes white spaces that I want to maintain (e.g. after the comma and in between Wembley and Stadium, "1 Rome, 2 London, 3 Wembley Stadium"). I guess the "0-9 " needs be determined somehow as one continuous string. I tried various brackets, quotation marks, \s*, but nothing jet.

Note: I'm working in a visual basic environment and not allowing lookbehinds!

lookbehind regex-lookarounds regex-negation vba
1 Answers

You can use

\d+\s*(.*?)(?=,\s*\d+\s|$)

See the regex demo, get the values from match.Submatches(0). Details:

  • \d+ - one or more digits
  • \s* - zero or more whitespaces
  • (.*?) - Group 1: zero or more chars other than line break chars as few as possible
  • (?=,\s*\d+\s|$) - a positive lookahead that requires ,, zero or more whitespaces, one or more digits and then a whitespace OR end of string immediately to the right of the current location.

Here is a demo of how to get all matches:

Sub TestRegEx()
    Dim matches As Object, match As Object
    Dim str As String

    str = "1 Rome, 2 London, 3 Wembley Stadium"
    
    Set regex = New regExp
    regex.Pattern = "\d+\s*(.*?)(?=,\s*\d+\s|$)"
    regex.Global = True

    Set matches = regex.Execute(str)
    
    For Each match In matches
        Debug.Print match.subMatches(0)
    Next
End Sub

Output:

enter image description here

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