Here is the test string:

[x] Package - Front and Rear align, rotate and balance 4 wheels ------------------- $105.00

I want to capture multiple groups as follows:

• Group 1: Open square bracket, 0-3 characters then close bracket
• Group 2: Longest text that excludes --
• Group 3: Longest text that has only -
• Group 4: remainder

Here's my failed attempt

^(\[.{0,3}\])(. (?!.*--.*))(-*)(.*)$

Also I do not have access to lookbehind if that makes a difference.

CodePudding user response：

You can use

^(\[[^][]{0,3}])\s*(.*?)\s*(-- )\s*(.*)

See the regex demo.

Details:

• ^ - start of string
• (\[[^][]{0,3}]) - Group 1: a [ char, then zero to three occurrences of any chars other than [ and ] and then a ] char
• \s* - zero or more whitespaces
• (.*?) - Group 2: any zero or more chars other than line break chars as few as possible
• \s* - zero or more whitespaces
• (-- ) - Group 3: a hyphen and then one or more hyphens
• \s* - zero or more whitespaces
• (.*) - Group 4: any zero or more chars other than line break chars as many as possible.