Creating a regex that targets only the first line with less than 8 words-CodePudding

I'm having trouble creating a regular expression that combines two statements.

What I want is to create a regex which targets only the first line of something - ^(.*)$ - and only if it has 8 words or fewer - /^(?:\s*\S (?:\s \S ){0,24})?\s*$/.

I have the individual expressions but I can't seem to join them. Can anyone point me in the direction of where I'm going wrong?

CodePudding user response：

Is there any specific reason for trying to solve this with regular expressions? I feel that this could be achieved easier without regex at all in two steps:

const text = `Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
consectetur adipiscing elit, 
sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut
labore et dolore magna aliqua.`

const firstLine = text.split("\n")[0]

if (firstLine.split(" ").length <= 8) {
  console.log("First line has 8 or less words")
} else {
  console.log("First line has more than 8 words")
}

Main issue with doing this the way you described is actually "counting" words, I can't see how regex helps in here with this? Is this a hard requirement?

CodePudding user response：

You could try this pattern: /^\s*(\b\w \b\W*){0,8}\n/gi (find 8 words or fewer, follow by a linefeed)

let text = `one two three four five six seven eight
           nine ten eleven twelve`;
let pattern = /^\s*(\b\w \b\W*){0,8}\n/gi;
let matching = text.match(pattern);

CodePudding user response：

you should try this:

^(.*)(?:\s \S ){0,7}\s*$