Regex group findings of two matches

Question

I'm not big fan of regex but this time I think that there is no way to do what i want. Please see my example with real live testing: (BEGIN @\d+\b.*?ACTION_READLN ~.+?~) Consider such raw text data:

BEGIN @1011 Text
Text
    ACTION_READLN ~variableName~
Text
END
BEGIN @1012
asdasd
    ACTION_READLN ~someothervariable~
END
BEGIN @1013

asd
END

I was able to create regex which finds "BEGIN @(only numbers)" and "ACTION_READLN ~*~"

BEGIN @\d+|(ACTION_READLN.~.+~)

Now, I want to group first occurrence of BEGIN with first occurrence of ACTION_READLN. How i can do this?

EDIT: Expected results:

Group1:
BEGIN @1011
ACTION_READLN ~variableName~

Group2:
BEGIN @1012
ACTION_READLN ~someothervariable~

Yes, it's weidu scripting. Unknow and nothing interesting for devs. — ALIENQuake, Nov 09 '15 at 22:09
You mean [`(BEGIN @\d+\b.*?ACTION_READLN ~.+?~)`](https://regex101.com/r/sR2dT8/2) ? — anubhava, Nov 09 '15 at 22:10
@anubhava's pattern works but you have to make sure that you let `.` token also match newlines or else it may not match anything — R Nar, Nov 09 '15 at 22:12
@RNar: That's precisely why I have included `s` flag in demo link — anubhava, Nov 09 '15 at 22:16
just explicitly stating it if @ALIENQuake did not realize, I know the `s` flag was included — R Nar, Nov 09 '15 at 22:17
a nice trick that i saw from @stribizhev before to match all characters including newlines was `[\s\S]`. It matches any character that is a space or is not a space (effectively, all characters possible). — d0nut, Nov 09 '15 at 22:27
You cannot get 2 disconnected substrings into one capturing group. — Wiktor Stribiżew, Nov 09 '15 at 22:50

bobble bubble · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-10T07:47:01.630

1

Use s flag only in between for dot to consume newlines. Groups will capture needed stuff.

$re = '/(BEGIN @\d+)\b(?s:.*?)(ACTION_READLN.*)/';

See demo at regex101. With preg_match_all use PREG_SET_ORDER to set output mode if desired.

preg_match_all($re, $str, $out, PREG_SET_ORDER);

Captured matches in each $out will be elements [1] and [2]. [0] the full match. Try at eval.in

edited Nov 10 '15 at 07:47

answered Nov 10 '15 at 04:41

bobble bubble

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Thanks, this will definitely help me to get my results using C# – ALIENQuake Nov 11 '15 at 06:19

Regex group findings of two matches

1 Answers1