Match strings with line breaks between two characters

Question

How can I match line breaks between two asterisks in Ruby? I have this string

Foo **bar**
test **hello
world** 12345

and I only want to find

**hello
world**

I tried it with \\*{1,2}(.*)\\n(.*)\\*{1,2} but this matches

**bar**
test **

I played with a non greedy matcher like \\*{1,2}(.*?)\\n(.*?)\\*{1,2} but this doesn't work either, so I hope someone can help.

Answer 1

You may use

/\*{1,2}\b([^*]*)\R([^*]*)\b\*{1,2}/

See the Rubular demo

Details

• \\*{1,2} - 1 or 2 asterisks
• \\b - a word boundary, the next char must be a word char
• ([^*]*) - Group 1: any 0+ chars other than *
• \\R - a line break sequence
• ([^*]*) - Group 2: any 0+ chars other than *
• \\b - a word boundary, the preceding char must be a word char
• \\*{1,2} - 1 or 2 asterisks

Answer 2

Wiktor already gave a good answer. Here is another way of doing it:

(?<=\*{1,2})([^*])*(?=\*{1,2})

Tested here

NOTE: This will not work in Ruby, but it can work in some other languages

From the link in this answer:

Subexp of look-behind must be fixed-width.