How to allow slashes in this PHP regex?

Question

I have been trying for hours now and also read the Regex wiki here on Stackoverflow but can't seem to accomplish this regex. This is the string I have:

Lorem: 8 FB / Ipsum-/Dolor: Some Text / Dolor: Some text with (brackets) / Sit amet.: Some Text with/slash / foobar / Last one: 36 foos

What I would like to extract is: Lorem , Ipsum-/Dolor , Dolor , Sit amet. , Last one . So basically everything from the beginning of the sentence or after a slash until the colon.

Whatever I try the problem is always the foobar since it always sticks together with Last one . What I tried for example so far is: ( \\/ |\\A)([^(?!.* \\/ )].*?): which I hoped would extract everything starting from a slash going until a colon but not if there is / (empty space, slash, empty space). That way I wanted to make sure not to get foobar / Last one returned.

Could someone provide me with some hint

Answer 1

Note that you make a common mistake placing a sequence of patterns into a character class ( [...] ) thus making the regex engine match a single character from the defined set. [^(?!.* \\/ )] matches a single character other than ( , ? , ! , . , etc.

You may use a tempered greedy token :

(?: \/ |\A)((?:(?! \/ )[^:])+):
             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

See the regex demo . The literal spaces may be replaced with \\s (if you can match any whitespaces) or \\h (to only match horizontal whitespaces).

Details :

• (?: \\/ |\\A) - either space + / + space or start of string
• ((?:(?! \\/ )[^:])+) - Group 1 capturing one or more symbols other than : ( [^:] ) that is not a starting point for a space + / + space sequence
• : - a literal colon.