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 jill. went up the hill. to fetch a pail."

/.+\./ matches the whole sentence (example)
/(.+?\.)/ matches each instance (example)

Is there a way to just match the first instance?

Answer 1

/^([^.]+)/

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 2

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."