Javascript regular expression: match anything up until something (if there it exists)

Question

Hi I am new to regular expression and this may be a very easy question (hopefully).

I am trying to use one solution for 3 kind of string

• \"45%\", expected

Answer 1

How about the simpler

str.match(/[^%]*/i)[0]

Which means, match zero-or-more character, which is not a %.

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Edit: If need to parse until , then you could parse a sequence pf characters, followed by , then then discard the , which means you should use positive look-ahead instead of negative.

str.match(/.*?(?=<\/a>|$)/i)[0]

This means: match zero-or-more character lazily, until reaching a or end of string.

Note that *? is a single operator, (.*)? is not the same as .*?.

(And don't parse HTML with a single regex, as usual.)