Match everything up to a specific character whether it exists or not

Question

How do I match everything on the line but stop when I find a semicolon? If I never find one I should continue matching even if one doesn't exist.

Here is some sample input:

captureme; dontcaptureme
captureme andme andme
captureme andme andme; butnotme

I've tried a lazy quantifier (\w*?); but it won't work if I make the semicolon optional. See my current regex fiddle here.

Answer 1

You can use

^[^;\n]*

With multiline modifier.

See demo

The ^ in a multiline mode will match at the beginning of a line, and the negated character class [^;\n] will match any character but a semi-colon or a newline symbol. * will make the regex engine match those characters 0 or more times. Thus, if you do not want to match emoty lines, use the + quantifier instead.