regex – multiple matches after a specific word

Simplified example: consider the string aabaabaabaabaacbaabaabaabaa

I want to match all aa occurrences only after the c in the middle, using one regex expression.

The closest I’ve come to is c.*\Kaa but it only matches the last aa, and only the first aa with the ungreedy flag.

I’m using the regex101 website for testing.

>Solution :

You can use

(?:\G(?!^)|c).*?\Kaa

See the regex demo. Details:

• (?:\G(?!^)|c) – either the end of the previous successful match (\G(?!^)) or (|) a c char
• .*? – any zero or more chars other than line break chars, as few as possible
• \K – forget the text matched so far
• aa – an aa string.