Regex match occurrences only after character sequence

Question

I want to find all the characters after w\'s that occur in this string, but only the ones after foo

edward woodward foo edward woodward

Answer 1

You may use the following regex with a PCRE engine:

(?:\bfoo\b|\G(?!^))[^w]*w\K.

See the regex demo.

Details

• (?:\bfoo\b|\G(?!^)) - either a whole word foo (\bfoo\b) or (|) the end of the previous match (\G(?!^))
• [^w]* - any 0+ chars other than w
• w - a w char
• \K - match reset operator discarding all text matched so far
• . - any char (other than line break chars, if you need to match them with . add (?s) at the pattern start or replace . with (?s:.))