Regex to match the first occurrence of a string

Question

I have this string: City - This is some text. This is some more - and continues here. I would like to split the string at the first ' - ' to find 'city' (just a sample word, it can be other words as well). Plus to find the rest of the text after ' - '. I constructed this expression: ``` (^[\D\W\S]*)( - )([\D\W\S]*) ``` But this finds the last occurrence of ' - ' instead of the first one. How can I stop at the first occurrence ?

Accepted Answer

The simplest solution would be to explicitly forbid the dash to be part of the first group:

```
^([^-]*) - (.*)
```

Explanation:

```
^        # Start of string
([^-]*)  # Match any number of characters except dashes
\ - \    # Match a dash (surrounded by spaces)
(.*)     # Match anything that follows
```

However, this would fail if your string could contain a dash in the first group (just not surrounded by spaces). If that's the case, then you can make use of lazy quantifiers:

```
^(.*?) - (.*)
```

Explanation:

```
^        # Start of string
(.*?)    # Match any number of characters, as few as possible
\ - \    # Match a dash (surrounded by spaces)
(.*)     # Match anything that follows
```

Regex to match the first occurrence of a string

Solution

Problem