Excluding text at the beginning of a string - regex

Question

I'm new to using RegEx and I'm still stumbling around a bit, so I'm sorry if this is a basic question. I'm trying to extract a string from between two parenthesis and I can't seem to figure out how to exclude the first part from my match.
This is my regex pattern:
(.+?)(?= -)
I want to extract a birth date, for example, excluding the "b." and the training "-". Here's a sample set:
( b. circa 1883 - d. Mar 03, 1960 )
( b. May 21, 1887 - d. Jan 24, 1979 )
( b. May 28, 1902 Zembin, BELARUS - d. Dec 22, 1998 Florida, USA )
( b. Jan 09, 1886 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA - d. May 17, 1969 New York, New York, USA )
My regex matches ( b. Jan 09, 1886 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (for example) but also includes "( b. " prefix, which I want to exclude.
The regex also matches the following text, which I would like to exclude as well:
Husband of Sarah Wilder (August 2000
Also, I cannot get the following string to match, presumably because of the dot and space in St. Louis.
( b. Jun 28, 1920 St. Louis, Missouri, USA )
I've been banging my head for several hours and just can't quite get the rest of it. Any help or guidance would be very much appreciated. I've already gotten a lot of help from reading many of the posts here.
Thanks so much!

Answer 1

Assuming that your data always contains a hyphen followed by d., you can try this: (?<=b\. )(.*) - d\.
(?<=b\. ) matches the b. text without it being added to the matching text.
(.*) is a capturing group that contains the match. It captures everything until the terminating - d. is hit. Note that the . characters must be escaped to match correctly as they are regex special characters.

Answer 2

If it always starts with ( b. and end with - d. <something> ), you can simply do
(?<=^\( b\. ).*(?= - d\..*\))
Which actually means you are match any characters (.*), with <start of line>( b. in front of it ((?<=^\( b\. )), and with - d. <something>) behind it ((?= - d\..*\))). https://regex101.com/r/vB2fmP/1
Or, if you don't mind using matching group:
^\( b\. (.*) - d \..*\)$
^ start of line
\( b\. open parenthesis, space, b, dot, space
( ) capture group
.* any char, any occurence
- d \..*\) space, hyphen, space, d, dot,
then any char any occurrence,
close parenthesis,
$ end of line
and capture group 1 is the value you need (personally I prefer this one instead).

Answer 3

To prevent capturing the leading ( b. you could prefix your regex with \(\s*b\.\s* which will match the ( and the b. surrounded by zero or more whitespace characters \s*.
Then from that point you would capture your values in a group (.*?) and you could update your positive lookahead (?= (?:\-|\))) to include a whitespace with either a - or a ).
\(\s*b\.\s*(.*?)(?= (?:\-|\)))

Answer 4

You can do this be making two passes through the search string. On the first pass you capture all text inside brackets, and on the second you clean up your results by removing the unwanted expressions. You don't say what language you are using, so I will use PHP.
$want = "/\(.+?\)/";
$dontWant = "/(b/.|/-)/";
$desiredResult = array();
$result = preg_match_all($want, $searchText, $matches); // Get all text inside brackets
if (count($matches[0])>0) { // $matches[0] holds all the matches
foreach ($matches[0] as $match) { // Loop through the matches
$desiredResult[] = preg_replace( $dontWant, "", $match); // Remove unwanted text
}
}
You can adjust this to whatever language you are using.