Regex matching beginning AND end strings

by

If you’re searching for hits within a larger text, you don’t want to use ^ and $ as some other responders have said; those match the beginning and end of the text. Try this instead:

\bdbo\.\w+_fn\b

\b is a word boundary: it matches a position that is either preceded by a word character and not followed by one, or followed by a word character and not preceded by one. This regex will find what you’re looking for in any of these strings:

dbo.functionName_fn
foo dbo.functionName_fn bar
(dbo.functionName_fn)

…but not in this one:

foodbo.functionName_fnbar

\w+ matches one or more “word characters” (letters, digits, or _). If you need something more inclusive, you can try \S+ (one or more non-whitespace characters) or .+? (one or more of any characters except linefeeds, non-greedily). The non-greedy +? prevents it from accidentally matching something like dbo.func1_fn dbo.func2_fn as if it were just one hit.

More Related Contents:

  1. Is it possible to escape regex metacharacters reliably with sed
  2. Regex: match everything but a specific pattern
  3. Regular expression for duplicate words
  4. Regular Expression for alphanumeric and underscores
  5. How to match multiple occurrences of a substring
  6. Find and kill a process in one line using bash and regex
  7. Regular expression to match standard 10 digit phone number
  8. Regex: matching up to the first occurrence of a character
  9. Convert a char to upper case using regular expressions (EditPad Pro)
  10. Regex: Remove lines containing “help”, etc
  11. How to check if a line is blank using regex
  12. How to Use/Enable (RegExp object) Regular Expression using VBA (MACRO) in word
  13. Remove .php from urls with htaccess
  14. R dplyr: rename variables using string functions
  15. What does ?= mean in a regular expression?
  16. Regular Expressions with repeated characters
  17. replace a part of a string with REGEXP in sqlite3
  18. Why do ^ and $ not work as expected?
  19. Regular Expression Match to test for a valid year
  20. how to use a regular expression to extract json fields?
  21. Searching for all variations of hyphens and dashes in Regex
  22. How do I remove all non-ASCII characters with regex and Notepad++?
  23. “Unknown escape sequence” error in Go
  24. shell script. how to extract string using regular expressions
  25. Regular expression to match a valid absolute Windows directory containing spaces
  26. While replacing using regex, How to keep a part of matched string?
  27. Regex for field that allows numbers and spaces
  28. Remove all characters before a period in a string
  29. powershell extract text between two strings
  30. Get Twitter @Username with Regex in R

Leave a Comment