Get all the characters until a new date/hour is found - regex

Question

I have to parse a lot of content with a regular expression.
The content might, for example, be:
14-08-2015 14:18 : Example : Hello =) How are you?
What are you doing?
14-08-2015 14:19: Example2 : I'm fine thanks!
I have this regular expression that will of course return 2 matches, and the groups that I need - data, hour, name, multi line message:
(\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4})\s?(\d{2}:\d{2})\s?:([^:]+):([^\d]+)
The problem is that if a number is written inside the message this will not be OK, because the regex will stop getting more characters.
For example in this case this will not work:
14-08-2015 14:18 : Example : Hello =) How are you?
What are you 2 doing?
14-08-2015 14:19: Example2 : I'm fine thanks!
How do I get all the characters until a new date/hour is found?

Answer 1

The problem is with your final capturing group ([^\d]+).
Instead you can use ((?:(?!\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4})[\s\S])+)
The outer parenthesis: ((?:(?!\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4})[\s\S])+) indicate a capturing group
The next set of parenthesis: ((?:(?!\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4})[\s\S])+) indicate a non-capturing group that we want to match 1 to infinite amount of times.
Inside we have a negative look ahead: ((?:(?!\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4})[\s\S])+). This says that whatever we are matching cannot include a date.
What we actually capture: ((?:(?!\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4})[\s\S])+) means we capture every character including a new line.
The entire regex that works looks like this:
(\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4})\s?(\d{2}:\d{2})\s?:([^:]+):((?:(?!\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4})[\s\S])+)
https://regex101.com/r/wH5xR2/2

Answer 2

Use a lookahead for dates and get everything up to that.
/^(\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4})\s?(\d{2}:\d{2})\s?:([^:]+):\s?((?:(?!^\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4}\s?\d{2}:\d{2}).)*)/sm
I've edited you regex in two ways:
Added ^to the front, ensuring you only start from timestamps on their own line, which should filter out most issues with people posting timestamps
Replaced the last capturing group with ((?:(?!^\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4}\s?\d{2}:\d{2}).)*)
(?!^\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4}\s?\d{2}:\d{2}) is a negative lookahead, with date
(?:(lookahead).)* Looks for any amount of characters that aren't followed by a date anchored to the start of a line.
((?:(lookahead).)*) Just captures the group for you.
It's not that efficient, but it works. Note the s flag for dotall (dot matches newlines) and m flag that lets ^ match at the start of line. ^ is necessary in the lookahead so that you don't stop the match in case someone posts a timestamp, and in the start to make sure you only match dates from the start of a line.
DEMO: https://regex101.com/r/rX8eH0/3
DEMO with flags in regex: https://regex101.com/r/rX8eH0/4