I have string of text that follows the format below.

code (family) - LongName (ShortName)

I want to parse out "ShortName" and the following works

\).*\(([^\)] )\)

but if I use the above RegEx on an unformatted line of text it returns blank. I'd rather it return the unformatted string

CodePudding user response：

Your pattern is unanchored, and the match can occur in the middle of the string.

If there can be a single match, you could prepend an anchor, and in the alternation | match the whole line.

^.*\).*?\(([^\)\n] )\)|^. 

Regex demo

If there can be more matches, you could make the dot non greedy .*? to not only get the last occurence, and only match the whole line if the pattern does not occur using a negative lookahead.

\).*?\(([^\)\n] )\)|^(?!.*\).*?\(([^\)\n] )\)). 

Regex demo