Regex with negative lookahead across multiple lines

Question

For the past few hours I\'ve been trying to match address(es) from the following sample data and I can\'t get it to work:

medicalHistory      None
address            


        

Answer 1

The problem with your regex is that + is greedy and goes until it finds a character out of that group, the @ in the first case and - in the second.

Another approach is to use a non-greedy quantifier and a positive look-ahead for a newline followed by a word-character, like (python version):

re.findall(r'address\s+.*?(?=\n\w)', s, re.DOTALL)

It yields:

['address             24 Lewin Street, KUBURA, \n                NSW, Australia',
 'address             16 Yarra Street, \n                                     LAWRENCE, VIC, Australia']