Regex - match up to first literal - regex

Question

I have some lines of code I am trying to remove some leading text from which appears like so:
Line 1: myApp.name;
Line 2: myApp.version
Line 3: myApp.defaults, myApp.numbers;
I am trying and trying to find a regex that will remove anything up to (but excluding) myApp.
I have tried various regular expressions, but they all seem to fail when it comes to line 3 (because myApp appears twice).
The closest I have come so far is:
.*?myApp
Pretty simple - but that matches both instances of myApp occurrences in Line 3 - whereas I'd like it to match only the first.
There's a few hundred lines - otherwise I'd have deleted them all manually by now.
Can somebody help me? Thanks.

Answer 1

You need to add an anchor ^ which matches the starting point of a line ,
^.*?(myApp)
DEMO
Use the above regex and replace the matched characters with $1 or \1. So that you could get the string myApp in the final result after replacement.
Pattern explanation:
^ Start of a line.
.*?(myApp) Shortest possible match upto the first myApp. The string myApp was captured and stored into a group.(group 1)
All matched characters are replaced with the chars present inside the group 1.

Answer 2

Your regular expression works in Perl if you add the ^ to ensure that you only match the beginnings of lines:
cat /tmp/test.txt | perl -pe 's/^.*?myApp/myApp/g'
myApp.name;
myApp.version
myApp.defaults, myApp.numbers;
If you wanted to get fancy, you could put the "myApp" into a group that doesn't get captured as part of the expression using (?=) syntax. That way it doesn't have to be replaced back in.
cat /tmp/test.txt | perl -pe 's/^.*?(?=myApp)//g'
myApp.name;
myApp.version
myApp.defaults, myApp.numbers;