Match at every second occurrence

Question

Is there a way to specify a regular expression to match every 2nd occurrence of a pattern in a string?

Examples

• searching for a agains

Answer 1

There's no "direct" way of doing so but you can specify the pattern twice as in: a[^a]*a that match up to the second "a".

The alternative is to use your programming language (perl? C#? ...) to match the first occurence and then the second one.

EDIT: I've seen other responded using the "non-greedy" operators which might be a good way to go, assuming you have them in your regex library!