Regex may contain a character

Question

I have 2 kinds of data.

One data is something like this

ws=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9

and the another data like this

ws=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9;utmz=111872281.1437151704.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none);

I wanna get the ws value, like

eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9

But i got problems for split the ";" character. Because sometime the data have the character, but sometimes it doesn't have that character.

I already tried using

ws=([^]*);?

and

ws=([^]*)[;?]

and I still doesn't get the correct data. Thank you very much.

Answer 1

You can use:

/\bws=([^;]*)/

and grab captured group #1

RegEx Demo

([^;]*) will match 0 or more of any character that is not ;

Answer 2

I would use this:

ws=(.*?)(;|$)

Try it online: http://regexr.com/3bfbv

• ws= searches for that exact text
• ( starts the matching group
• .*? searches for any characters, but as few characters as possbile ("non-greedy")
• ) stops the matching group
• (;|$) searches for either a ; or the end of the text (or the line)