Regular Expression to Extract Text Bounded by '/'

Magic Bullet Dave

I need to a regular expression to extract names from a GEDCOM file. The format is:

Fred Joseph /Smith/

Where the text bounded by the / is the surname and the Fred Joseph are the forenames. The complication is that the surname could be at any place in the text or may not be there at all. I need something that will extract the surname and capture everything else as the forenames.

This is as far as I have got and I have tried making groups optional with the ? qualifier but to no avail:

As you can see it has several problems: If the surname is missing nothing gets captured, the forename(s) sometimes have leading and trailing spaces, and I have 3 capture groups when I'd really like 2. Even better would be if the capture group for the surname didn't include the '/' characters.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Niitaku

For your last line, I'm not sure there is a way to join the group 1 with group 3 into a single group.

Here is my proposed solution. It doesn't capture spaces around forenames.

^(?:\h*([a-z\h]+\b)\h*)?(?:\/([a-z\h]+)\/)?(?:\h*([a-z\h]+\b)\h*)?$

To correctly match the names, care to use the insensitive flag, and if you test all lines at once, use multiline flag.

See the demo

Explanation

^ start of the line
(?:\h*([a-z\h]+\b)\h*)? first non-capturing group that matches 0 or 1 time:
- \h* 0 or more horizontal spaces
- ([a-z\h]+\b) captures in a group letters and spaces, but stops at the end of the last word
- \h* matches the possible remaining spaces without capturing
(?:\/([a-z\h]+)\/)? second non-capturing group that matches 0 or 1 time a name in a capturing group surrounded by slashes
(?:\h*([a-z\h]+\b)\h*)? third non-capturing group doing the same as first one, capturing the names in a third group.
$ end of the line

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edited at2020-10-26

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