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(Regex) capture two substrings if delimiter exists, otherwise one substring and blank

May 29, 2022

I want to use a regex to capture two substrings into two separate capture groups. The delimiter between Country and City is " ■" (a space followed by a black square). If the delimiter doesn’t exist, then it means there is no city, in which case it should capture a blank value. Here is the text:

<p>USA</p>
<p>SPAIN ■Madrid</p>
<p>FRANCE</p>

I have the following regex, which captures everything between the <p> tags:

/<p>(.+)<\/p>/

How can I capture Country and City separately (or blank city if no delimiter)?

>Solution :

Try:

/<p>(.+?)(?:\s■(.+))?<\/p>/

(.+?) is the first capture group. The ? makes it lazy to not interfere with the whitespace.
The second group is a non-capture group due to the ?: and it contains the second capture group (.+)
The ? after the non-capture group makes the whole construct optional in case there is no city.