Regex: matching up to the first occurrence of a character

Question

I am looking for a pattern that matches everything until the first occurrence of a specific character, say a ";" - a semicolon.

I wrote this:

/^(.*);/ 

But it actually matches everything (including the semicolon) until the last occurrence of a semicolon.

Answer 1

You need

/[^;]*/ 

The [^;] is a character class, it matches everything but a semicolon.

To cite the perlre manpage:

You can specify a character class, by enclosing a list of characters in [] , which will match any character from the list. If the first character after the "[" is "^", the class matches any character not in the list.

This should work in most regex dialects.