Regular expression for capturing the first alpha string in a document

[keydrive]

Hi,

I need a regular expression for capturing the first alpha string in a document not necessarily on the first line

match first instance

Here is a few tried permutations

[:alpha:]*

[:alpha:]*.[:alpha:]*

[A-Z][a-z]*.[A-Z][a-z]*\r

[Rabbit]

It would help to see some example inputs and expected results.

[keydrive]

Hi,

Here is an example document. I only want the first string in the document captured - nothing else. Note the First string could be more than two words in mix case. The end of line does not work for me

%20
Banff Springs
Banff Sprints Hotel
%20
Mountain Biking 34.78
%20
Table # 55  holiday forward
$1,899,999.00

55555
Togo Hot Specials

[Rabbit]

So in that example you just want the word Banff? We also need to know what language you're programming in or which regex engine you're using.

[keydrive]

JRegex is fine.

I need to capture the title beit on the first line, second or third after a single return char or multiple. So if there are three blank lines and then text that is to be assumed the title and all the text on that line is required. In this example it would be Banff Springs.

Thanks for you help

[Rabbit]

Well, assuming multiline is turned on then the regex you would use is "[^\w]*\w[^\n]*" So basically, any number of non-alphabet characters followed by an alphabet character followed by any number of non-new line characters.

[keydrive]

The first line is now being captured as the first hit in the test-text area of QuickREx. The other text below is also matching as secondary.(in yellow) if you are farmilar with QuickREx. I tried to include a line brake so that it would only highlight the first instance, being the title but it doesn't seem to work.

Is there an option so that only the first instance is captured? Like, read all information until end of line and nothing else?

Thanks for your help!

[Rabbit]

Turns out you can just use [a-zA-z][^\n]* and if you have global turned off, it'll return the first result and if you have global turned on, you just need the first result.

[keydrive]

Thanks for your help Dr. Rabbit

Appreciate the assistance!

[rampdv]

Hi keydrive
Here i provide the solution to u r example document using regular expression in perl.
Here i read a file data word by word and push that data into array and print the first value of the array

if u have any doubts or find any error in code please make a follow up

open(alpha,"alphastring.txt");

while(<alpha>){

while($_ =~ /([a-zA-Z]+)/ig) {

push @array,$1;

}

}
print " $array[0] \n";