Regular Expression - How do I capture before the first match?

Question

Apparel & Fashion · United States · 10001+ employees · 5 billion Revenue

Non-profit Organization · Canada · 501-1000 employees

Here are a couple examples above. I am trying to capture the industry ( ex. Apparel & Fashion or Non-Profit Organization )

I am trying to use the first · as a capture reference

This captures everything before the last dot (.+)\s·

But i want to capture everything before the first dot. How do I do this? Sorry that this is a basic question.

Answer 1

Capture everything that is NOT the · . This allows you to use preg_match_all if needed to get all of the parts delimited by · :

([^·]+)

You can add the beginning anchor to only get the first one, but probably not needed:

^([^·]+)

However in PHP just:

$result = explode('·', $text)[0];

Or to get all:

$results = explode('·', $text)[0];
echo $results[0];
echo $results[1];
//etc...

Answer 2

You should use non-greedy regexp. (.+?)·

Answer 3

No need for regular expressions at all, see this code:

$position = strpos($string, "·", 5);  
$string = substr ( $string , 0, $position - 2 );

Where $string is the string to parse