What Regex would capture everything from ' mark to the end of a line?

Question

I have a text file that denotes remarks with a single \'.

Some lines have two quotes but I need to get everything from the first instance of a \

Answer 1

When I tried '.* in windows (Notepad ++) it would match everything after first ' until end of last line.

To capture everything until end of that line I typed the following:

'.*?\n

This would only capture everything from ' until end of that line.

Answer 2

The appropriate regex would be the ' char followed by any number of any chars [including zero chars] ending with an end of string/line token:

'.*$

And if you wanted to capture everything after the ' char but not include it in the output, you would use:

(?<=').*$

This basically says give me all characters that follow the ' char until the end of the line.

Edit: It has been noted that $ is implicit when using .* and therefore not strictly required, therefore the pattern:

'.* 

is technically correct, however it is clearer to be specific and avoid confusion for later code maintenance, hence my use of the $. It is my belief that it is always better to declare explicit behaviour than rely on implicit behaviour in situations where clarity could be questioned.

Answer 3

This will capture everything up to the ' in backreference 1 - and everything after the ' in backreference 2. You may need to escape the apostrophes though depending on language (\')

/^([^']*)'?(.*)$/

Quick modification: if the line doesn't have an ' - backreference 1 should still catch the whole line.

^ - start of string
([^']*) - capture any number of not ' characters
'? - match the ' 0 or 1 time
(.*) - capture any number of characters
$ - end of string

Answer 4

'.*

I believe you need the option, Multiline.

Answer 5

In your example I'd go for the following pattern:

'([^\n]+)$

use multiline and global options to match all occurences.

To include the linefeed in the match you could use:

'[^\n]+\n

But this might miss the last line if it has no linefeed.

For a single line, if you don't need to match the linefeed I'd prefer to use:

'[^$]+$

Answer 6

'.*$

Starting with a single quote ('), match any character (.) zero or more times (*) until the end of the line ($).