如何编写正则表达式以匹配自由文本和空格？

Question

Sorry for the bad title but it's a little complicated to get across in one line.

My data will look something like the following lines (each evaluated separately):

JOHNNY BE GOOD        2.55
Rubber Ducky (2012)           123.71
International: INT'L   29.12

I'm trying to split them as follows:

[JOHNNY BE GOOD][        ][2.55]
[Rubber Ducky (2012)][           ][123.71]
[International: INT'L][   ][29.12]

That is, from left-to-right, as much text as possible (including white-space), then any trailing white-space, then a decimal number with 2 decimal places.

So far I have the following expression but my white-space is captured with the text not by itself:

/(.*)(\s+)([0-9]+\.[0-9]{2})/

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Your (.*) is being greedy, ie, is taking all the characters it can. Try using the laziness operator ? :

/(.*?)(\s+)([0-9]+\.[0-9]{2})/

or well:

/([^\s]*)(\s+)([0-9]+\.[0-9]{2})/

Answer 2

You were pretty close, but you're using the . character which will match everything including white space. Simply add [^\\s] from the first captured group to your regex so that it'll look something like this

(.*[^\\s])(\\s+)([0-9]+\\.[0-9]{2})

http://gskinner.com/RegExr/?2vo43

Answer 3

I'd recommend changing the (\\s+) part to (\\s{2,}) which makes sure that there's repeating whitespace, not just a single character.

You also might want to throw in some line start/end anchors to prevent wildcards from "eating" too much data. To help balance this out and have them match at newlines, add the m flag to your regular expression.

Example