RegEx - Limit no of chars for each value in a separated string-CodePudding

I'm trying to make a RegEx to limit number of characters for each column in a separated list.

So in list with 5 columns; and would like to limit each column to 3 characters:

ABC;DE FGHIJ;KLMNOPQRS;T UVWX;YZ

The result I would like:

ABC;DE ;KLM;T U;YZ

Tried different look ahead but can figure it out :-(

CodePudding user response：

If you have a regex replacement available to you, you may try the following operation:

Find:    ([^;]{3})[^;] ?(;|$)
Replace: $1$2

The pattern matches:

([^;]{3}) the first 3 characters in $1
[^;] ? then match 1 more characters until reaching the nearest
(;|$) either ; or the end of the string (and capture ; in $2 if present)

We then replace with $1$2 to effectively trim off the unwanted characters.

Here is a link to a working demo.

CodePudding user response：

Another option is to match all the parts you need, using the following regex:

(?<=^|;)[^;]{1,3}

This will match:

Check the demo here.

CodePudding user response：

You can use

s/((?:;|^)[^;]{1,3})[^;]*/$1/g