I have a string
2045111780&&-3&5&-7
I want a regex to give me groups as:
2045111780
&&-
3
... and then next groups as
3
&
5
... and so on.
I came up with (\d+)(&&?-?)? but that gives me groups as:
2045111780
&&-
... and then next groups as
3
&
... and so on.
Note that I need the delim ( regex: &&?-? )
Thanks.
update1: changed the groups output.
I think it's not possible to share a match between groups (the -3 in your example). So, I recommend to do a 2 line processing: split the spring and take 2 pairs in an array. For example, using Perl:
$a = "2045111780&&-3&5&-7";
@pairs = split /&+/, $a;
# at this point you get $pairs[0] = '2045111780', $pairs[1] = '-3', ...
How about (-?\d+|&+). It will match numbers with an optional minus and sequences of &s.
If I understand correctly, you want to have overlapping matches.
You could use a regex like (-?\d+)(&&?)(-?\d+) and match it repeatedly until it fails, each time removing the beginning of the given string up to the start of the third group.
You could do it in perl like this:
$ perl -ne 'while (/(-?\d+)(&&?)(-?\d+)/g) { print $1, " ", $2, " ", $3, "\n"; pos() -= length($3); }'
2045111780&&-3&5&-7 # this is the input
2045111780 && -3
-3 & 5
5 & -7
But that's very ugly. The split approach by Miguel Prz is much, much cleaner.
