Regex select all after nth occurance of character

October 2, 2022

I have a string in the following format and I’m trying to return all the data after the 3rd occurrence of the ‘:’ character as in the example below.

user_name_1, 10:46:36 activity_name_1 : the text to be returned

So far I have the regex \:.* that returns everything after the first occurrence, eg. :46:36 activity_name_1 : the text to be returned

If I modify it to \:{3}.* eg. to look for the 3rd instance, the regex will not return any matches. It looks like it should be a very simple query but nothing I’ve tried seems to work.

I’ve already found the following question find value after nth occurence of – using RegEx however in this case they’re returning only the next 3 digits after the nth character and not the entire remaining string.

>Solution :

You can use

^(?:[^:]*:){3}\s*(\S.*)

See the regex demo. Details:

^ – start of string
(?:[^:]*:){3} – three occurrences of any zero or more chars other than a : and then a : char
\s* – zero or more whitespaces
(\S.*) – Group 1: a non-whitespace char and then the rest of the line.

See the JavaScript demo:

const text = "user_name_1, 10:46:36 activity_name_1 : the text to be returned";
const match = text.match(/^(?:[^:]*:){3}\s*(\S.*)/)
if (match) {
  console.log(match[1])
}