正则表达式迭代匹配多个单词

Question

I have this test string:

{.aa1 .b3c .f4}

I want to extract arbitrary number of words starting with literal dot . inside the braces. So I wrote this JavaScript regex:

/{((?=\.\w+?)(\.\w+?)\s*?)*}/g

I'm basically looking ahead (?=\\.\\w+?) , but if there's a match it isn't captured since lookahead is zero width, so then I capture (\\.\\w+?) , and then allow for possibility of spaces \\s*? , and then I group all this, and try to iterate by repeating it with * . But it doesn't work - regex101.com tells me that returns:

MATCH 1
1.  `.f4`
2.  `.f4`

.. while I'd want an array of matches being ( .aa1 , .b3c . .f4 ). How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

You may try the below positive lookahead based regex.

string.match(/\.\w+(?=[^{}]*\})/g)

I assumed that the parenthesis must be closed properly.

DEMO