Regex match everything up to first period

Question

Trying to get a lazy regex match of everything up until the first period of a sentence.

e.g. Just want to get \"jack and jill.\" from this sentence:
\"jack and j

Answer 1

If you only want the first occurrence, do not choose the scan method that returns all results in the string. You can use the match method that returns a MatchData instance, but you can also simply write:

> "jack and jill. went up the hill. to fetch a pail."[/.+?\./]
 => "jack and jill."

Answer 2

/^([^.]+)/

Let's break it down,

• ^ is the newline anchor

• [^.] this matches any character that's not a period

• \+ to take until a period

And the expression is encapsulated with () to capture it.

Answer 3

I would be inclined to use a regex, but there are other options.

str = "jack and jill. went up the hill. supposedly to fetch a pail of water."
str[0..i] if i = str.index('.')
  #=> "jack and jill."

str = "three blind mice"
str[0..i] if i = str.index('.')
  #=> nil