Regex anything(including new lines) up to certain sequence - multiple substrings JS

Question

The File I am trying to process looks like this:

...
...
15 Apr 2014 22:05 - id: content
15 Apr 2014 22:09 - id: content
15 Apr 2014 22:09 - id: content
with new line
16 Apr 2014 06:56 - id: content
with new line
with new line
16 Apr 2014 06:57 - id: content

16 Apr 2014 06:58 - id: content
...
...

the regex I have come up with is this: \\d{1,}[ ][AZ][az]{2}[ ](?:\\d{4}[ ]\\d{2}[:]\\d{2}|\\d{2}[:]\\d{2}).*

which results in:

This is almost right i just need to include newline characters, but if i include this [\\s\\S]* instead of .* only one match is returned.

What i would like to extract is a set of substrings where each string starts at the data sequence and ends at the next date sequence like so:

...
...
15 Apr 2014 22:05 - id: content //substring 1
15 Apr 2014 22:09 - id: content //substring 2
15 Apr 2014 22:09 - id: content //substring 3
with new line                   //substring 3
16 Apr 2014 06:56 - id: content //substring 4
with new line                   //substring 4
with new line                   //substring 4
16 Apr 2014 06:57 - id: content //substring 5

16 Apr 2014 06:58 - id: content //substring 6
...
...

Any help to what im missing?

Answer 1

You need to use a positive lookahead assertion.

\d{1,}[ ][A-Z][a-z]{2}[ ](?:\d{4}[ ]\d{2}[:]\d{2}|\d{2}[:]\d{2})[\s\S]*?(?:(?!\n\n)[\s\S])*?(?=\n\d{1,}[ ])|\d{1,}[ ][A-Z][a-z]{2}[ ](?:\d{4}[ ]\d{2}[:]\d{2}|\d{2}[:]\d{2}).*

DEMO

> var str = '...\n...\n15 Apr 2014 22:05 - id: content\n15 Apr 2014 22:09 - id: content\n15 Apr 2014 22:09 - id: content\nwith new line\n16 Apr 2014 06:56 - id: content\nwith new line\nwith new line\n16 Apr 2014 06:57 - id: content\n\n16 Apr 2014 06:58 - id: content\n...\n...';
undefined
> var re = /\d{1,}[ ][A-Z][a-z]{2}[ ](?:\d{4}[ ]\d{2}[:]\d{2}|\d{2}[:]\d{2})[\s\S]*?(?:(?!\n\n)[\s\S])*?(?=\n\d{1,}[ ])|\d{1,}[ ][A-Z][a-z]{2}[ ](?:\d{4}[ ]\d{2}[:]\d{2}|\d{2}[:]\d{2}).*/gm;
undefined
> str.match(re)
[ '15 Apr 2014 22:05 - id: content',
  '15 Apr 2014 22:09 - id: content',
  '15 Apr 2014 22:09 - id: content\nwith new line',
  '16 Apr 2014 06:56 - id: content\nwith new line\nwith new line',
  '16 Apr 2014 06:57 - id: content\n',
  '16 Apr 2014 06:58 - id: content' ]

Answer 2

See the second answer here: How to use JavaScript regex over multiple lines?

Try using the non-greedy quantifier [\\s\\S]? like that and see what it returns. Alternatively, just get back one output and split the whole string on newlines afterwards...