regular expression to delete separator and text after separator

Question

I am looking for a regular expression which removes text after a separator and removes the separator as well.
I tried .*& to remove text after & . This is working but I want to remove & from my string as well.

Like & , I have multiple other separators eg , ; \\ / - | (JT) , ; \\ / - | (JT)

How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

With .*& you're matching the text until and including the last & in your text. If you don't want to include that in the match, put it in a positive lookahead assertion :

.*(?=&)

To look for more than one separator, use alternation and a character class :

.*(?=[&,;\\/|-]|\(JT\))

Note that this will change something like

First, Middle & Last

to

First, Middle

because the match stops before the last separator. If you want it to stop at the first separator, use a lazy quantifier :

.*?(?=[&,;\\/|-]|\(JT\))

Note that you will need to escape the backslashes for the string processor, so that regex, written as a string, will look like

".*?(?=[&,;\\\\/|-]|\\(JT\\))"