Regex to get the first number after a certain string followed by any data until the number

Question

I have a piece of data, retrieved from the database and containing information I need. Text is entered in a free form so it's written in many different ways. The only thing I know for sure is that I'm looking for the first number after a given string, but after that certain string (before the number) can be any text as well.

I tried this (where mytoken is the string I know for sure its there) but this doesn't work.

/(mytoken|MYTOKEN)(.*)\d{1}/
/(mytoken|MYTOKEN)[a-zA-Z]+\d{1}/
/(mytoken|MYTOKEN)(.*)[0-9]/
/(mytoken|MYTOKEN)[a-zA-Z]+[0-9]/

Even mytoken can be written in capitals, lowercase or a mix of capitals and lowercase character. Can the expression be case insensitive?

Answer 1

You do not need any lazy matching since you want to match any number of non-digit symbols up to the first digit. It is better done with a \D*:

/(mytoken)(\D*)(\d+)/i

See the regex demo

The pattern details:

• (mytoken) - Group 1 matching mytoken (case insensitively, as there is a /i modifier)
• (\D*) - Group 2 matching zero or more characters other than a digit
• (\d+) - Group 3 matching 1 or more digits.

Note that \D also matches newlines, . needs a DOTALL modifier to match across newlines.