I want to capture the 'HELLO THERE WORLD' lines, but use the start and the end lines. However, it's just taking the last line.

regex: start\n(((\w ) (. ) (. ))\n) end

examples:

abcd 123 123
start
abcd 123 123
abcd 123 123
abcd 123 123
end
abcd 123 123

In the examples I want all the text between the start and the end to be In 3 groups for each line(group1=abcd,group2=123,group3=123) like that:

CodePudding user response：

(?s)(?!.*?start)^(\w )\s(\w )\s(\w )(?=.*?end)

https://regex101.com/r/fDcMJd/1

CodePudding user response：

Try this regex:

/(?<=start\n.*)(?:^([a-zA-Z] ) ([a-zA-Z] ) ([a-zA-Z] )$)(?=.*\nend)/gms

It should match every line with 3 words between start and end, and group those 3 words.

See example

CodePudding user response：

If you want to get all capture groups between start and end, you can make use of the Python PyPi regex module and the \G anchor to get consecutive matches.

(?:^start(?=(?:\n(?!start$|end$).*)*\nend$)|\G(?!^))\n(?!end\b)(\w )\s(\w )\s(\w )

Explanation

• (?: Non capture group
  • ^start Match start at the start of the string
  • (?=(?:\n(?!start$|end$).*)*\nend$) Assert that the word end is present without crossing the word start
  • | Or
  • \G(?!^) Assert the position at the end of the previous match, not at the start of the string
• ) Close the non capture group
• \n Match a newline
• (?!end\b) Negative lookahead, assert not the word end directly to the right
• (\w )\s(\w )\s(\w ) Capture group 1, 2 and 3 containing 1 or more word characters

See a Regex demo and a Python demo.