Lets say we have the string:
one day, when Anne, Lisa and Paul went to the store, then Anne said to Paul: "I love Lisa!". Then Lisa laughed and kissed Anne.
is there a way with regex to match the first name, and then match and all other occurrences of the same name in the string?
Given the name-matching regex /[A-Z][a-z]+ (with /g maybe?), can the regex matcher be made to remember the first match, and then use that match EXACTLY for the rest of the string? Other subsequent matches to the name-matching regex should be ignored (except for Anne in the example).
The result would be (if matches are replaced with "Foo"):
one day, when Foo, Lisa and Paul went to the store, then Foo said to Paul: "I love Lisa!". Then Lisa laughed and kissed Foo.
Please ignore the fact that the sentence start uncapitalized, or add an example that also handles this.
Using a script to get the first match and then using that as input for a second iteration works of course, but that’s outside the scope of the question (which is limited to ONE regex expression).
>Solution :
The only way I could think of is with non-fixed width lookbehinds. For example through Pypi’s regex module, and maybe Javascript too? Either way, assuming a name is capture through [A-Z][a-z]+ as per your question try:
\b([A-Z][a-z]+)\b(?<=^[^A-Z]*\1.*)
See an online demo
Here is a PyPi’s example:
import regex as re
s= 'Anne, Lisa and Paul went to the store, then Anne said to Paul: "I love Lisa!". Then Lisa laughed and kissed Anne.'
s_new = re.sub(r'\b([A-Z][a-z]+)\b(?<=^[^A-Z]*\1.*)', 'Foo', s)
print(s_new)
Prints:
Foo, Lisa and Paul went to the store, then Foo said to Paul: "I love Lisa!". Then Lisa laughed and kissed Foo.