正则表达式去查找带有撇号的单词

Question

I am trying to find a substring between two words, but my starting word contains an apostrophe and I can't seem to match it.

For example, in this following sentence

bus driver drove steady although the bus's steering was going nuts.

the correct answer to my search should be:

steering was going nuts

and not:

driver ... nuts

I tried this

re := regexp.MustCompile("(?s)bus[\\\'].*?nuts")

I also tried this:

re := regexp.MustCompile("(?s)bus'.*?nuts")

Can't seem to make it work.

Answer 1

You could use a string literal (with back quote) in order to include a single quote, with a capturing group:

re := regexp.MustCompile(`(?s)bus'.\s+(.*?nuts)`)

See this example:

var source_txt = `bus driver drove steady although the bus's steering was going nuts.`

func main() {
    fmt.Printf("Experiment with regular expressions.
")
    fmt.Printf("source text:
")
    fmt.Println("--------------------------------")
    fmt.Printf("%s
", source_txt)
    fmt.Println("--------------------------------")

    // a regular expression
    regex := regexp.MustCompile(`(?s)bus'.\s+(.*?nuts)`)
    fmt.Printf("regex: '%v'
", regex)
    matches := regex.FindStringSubmatch(source_txt)
    for i, v := range matches {
        fmt.Printf("match %2d: '%s'
", i+1, v)
    }
}

Output:

Experiment with regular expressions.
source text:
--------------------------------
bus driver drove steady although the bus's steering was going nuts.
--------------------------------
regex: '(?s)bus'.\s+(.*?nuts)'
match  1: 'bus's steering was going nuts'
match  2: 'steering was going nuts'

The FindStringSubmatch() :

identifying the leftmost match of the regular expression in s and the matches, if any, of its subexpressions

The match[1] would be the first capturing group.